Damaged iTunes Library

Today some sort of perfect storm of loading windows froze my computer for longer than normal. After two or three minutes I realized that there was a reasonable chance that my mouse wasn't going to respond, and so I powered my laptop off and restarted it. When I shut it down, iTunes was open on my computer and I suppose it's possible that something was corrupted during this time, because when I opened it after starting my laptop up again (this was a few hours later), it initially prompted me with the iTunes user agreement, and when I clicked accept it said that the iTunes library had been damaged and iTunes created a new library. The new library had only like 10 or 12 artists and (10 or) 12 albums, but information including play counts seemed to be up to date (although I haven't listened to any of the songs in this library in a few months, so it is unclear whether this is truly up to date or if it just appears that way).

I immediately panicked (duh) and googled the issue and, in my haste to fix it, I did the first thing that seemed to work for people. I deleted the iTunes library file and renamed the damaged library "iTunes Library". After trying various iterations of this fix (deleting the xml file, deleting the itl file, even renaming the damaged library "iTunes Library.xml, as if that would change the file to an xml file and save me), I somehow deleted even the new library, and when I opened iTunes it was now completely blank. I freaked out some more, and then did some more research, and found a different fix which involved moving the xml file to the desktop and deleting the itl library. From there, I imported the xml file as a playlist to iTunes from the File > Library > Import Playlist iTunes menu. At first nothing happened, but then I restored the oldest version of the iTunes Library.xml file and it recovered the library that had 12 albums on it. I figured I had screwed it up beyond repair at this point. I tried to System Restore my computer (I understand that this probably wouldn't work, but I thought I should try it anyway) but the system restore failed, giving me an error message after restarting my laptop. I'm not sure what else to do at this point. All my music is still on my computer, but the issue is that if I just re-imported all my music to iTunes, all my play counts would be gone, and they are very important to me. I do have a program that I used in the past called CopyTrans which helped me move music directly from my iPod back to iTunes while keeping all my play counts correct, however this isn't as useful to me as my iPod is only 160GB and I have somewhere around 200GB of music now, so I'd still have to manually move a good 40 or 50GB of music from my Music folders to iTunes without play counts. I hope it won't have to come to that. Finally, in a last ditch effort to fix it myself without posting this, I also tried using a program called Recuva to recover a version of the xml library file from before the ship sank, but to no avail. So what do you guys think, am I screwed? Or is there something I can do to restore my previous iTunes library?

I still have the damaged iTunes Library.itl file, and I'm fairly certain it has the information for my correct library (its filesize is 6.91MB while the new iTunes Library.itl files are merely ~30KB files), but unfortunately I haven't been able to find any way to get it to open or run in iTunes.

Also, for reference, I run iTunes 9 as I strongly prefer its interface and look to 10 and 11. It has not been updated and I'd prefer to keep it that way (or at least, keep it iTunes 9) if possible. I also have a few temporary files, one from about a week or two ago. I have no idea if they can help me restore my library but I figured I might as well mention them. I'll be happy to provide any other information that may be relevant. I'd really appreciate any and all help I can get!

EDIT: Oh, also one more thing. For a while now when I open iTunes instead of opening normally it always opens up as if I'm installing iTunes for the first time despite it already being installed (I get the small window that says "Welcome to iTunes" and has the 'Next' and 'Cancel' options (or maybe they're 'Yes' and 'No', idk). I always just exit out of that box and my iTunes library opens as normal. I've never gone through that installation process because I've been afraid that doing so will wipe my library, but should I do it now? Is there any chance that it might restore my old library somehow? Or, perhaps more reasonably, I should do it now while I have the clean slate library so that it stops popping up when I do recover or refurbish my library?