itunes erased

Here's a long one:

Recently my itunes library was all but completely erased; reasons unknown. I only know that there was a recent update to itunes and I downoalded 4 updates for Windows 7 the night before.

I was left with the 715 songs that I bought through the itunestore. ALL others songs loaded from my CD collection were gone. Of course they were still on my hard drive in the music folder so I reloaded them.

Contacted Apple. They said this was impossible. Please reload itunes, download purchased songs from the cloud and import the music folder from my hard drive. Duh!

So I did and spent several hours starting to rebuild my library.

Next day, same thing. Only 715 purchased songs and no imported songs. This time no updates the night before or day of.

Contacted Apple again and they gave me the same BS.

But the biggest problems are: Album artwork not saved, start/time settings not saved, genre changes not saved, track listings not saved, equializer settings not saved and above all else, NO PLAYLISTS WERE SAVED.

Apple support says there is no way itunes just resets itself but I absolutely disagree. They then told me to be sure and make a back-up of my library. I told them that I have the entire library on both my itouch and iphone. When I asked why I can't reload my library from either of those devices, they had no answer; at least not one they were willing to share.

I have spent hundreds of hours making changes to many individual songs and now I have to start over.

THEN, I discover that my computer no longer recognizes my DVD/CD Player/Writer. So I take it to the Geek Squad at Best Buy. After explaining the strange disappearance of my DVD drive, the first questoin he asked was, "Have you recently re-installed itunes?" He showed me how itunes affects the DVD player registery. He reinstalled the drivers and it works fine now. But now I have that bill to pay.

Has anybody else experienced of heard of this occurrance?

How can I get my complete, un-corrupted library from my iphone or itouch back to my pc? Apple support is of no help.

Thanks in advance,

Screwedbyapple