Transferring iPod music to iTunes 8 woes + lost purchased music?!

I'm sure that this has been covered plenty of times before, but can anybody give me a quick answer to save me having to trawl through thousands of other posts please?

Due to my old laptop with my music collection on dying, I've now got a new laptop and installed iTunes 8.0, but now when I've come to transfer my music back to it I've got the following problems:

1) It won't transfer anything back into Windows/iTunes library

2) 4 out of the 5 DRM purchased albums have disappeared off of my iPod since tring to sync those with iTunes. Now all I have showing in my iTunes library is one purchased album.

HELP!

1) What's the easiest way of transferring my music back to my computer? I've tried importing the hidden music folders from my iPod via iTunes option, which doesn't seem to do anything!

Are the problems because of iTunes 8? Will they be solved with an older version of iTunes?

2) Fortunately I've backed up my purchased albums to CD, but as my new comp's a laptop it'll be a hassle to copy the files to USB and reimport - is there a way to re-download them from the iTunes store?

At the moment I'm seriously p**sed off with Apple and iTunes completely!

Thanks for any help & advice!

Andy