stars assigned by iTunes???

Jim, I think we're all seeing this, and I haven't found any way to turn this feature off. (It does seem to be a feature and not a bug.) The only real solution, I guess, is to be super-diligent about rating everything.

I'm almost embarrassed to tell you my workaround because it is so crude. After losing all my ratings in a library meltdown several years ago, I got into the habit of "hard-writing" ratings into the music files. I do this by having smart playlists for every rating level, selecting all tracks, and writing the corresponding rating (e.g. "5stars") into the Description field, which I don't use for anything else. Thus if my star ratings get messed up again, I can recover them, and I can also make smart playlists using the rule: Description > contains > 5stars ... or whatever. I don't doubt there's a more elegant solution somewhere.

Edited to add: I should note that I use Doug's "Multi-Item Edit" applescript for this, as it makes the Description field available for batch editing. You can do much the same within iTunes but there's a smaller number of fields available, like Grouping and Comments, which I use for other purposes.