Cannot delete music files from iTunes

[gelleian]

This is driving me insane. I am running the latest verion of iTunes (8.0.2) on an iMac (OSX10.5.6). My music library is housed on an external hard drive and I have about 300GB of music stored.

Last week, I was cleaning up my music collection and noticed that it was taking an excruciatingly long time to delete even a few files (remove from library + remove files from computer). Somewhere on the order of over a minute to delete a 10-track album. I have absolutely no other speed issues on this machine so I didn't think this was processor or memory related.

I read on another forum that someone with the same issue deleted com.apple.itunes.plist which sped up their delete times considerably. I did the same thing but haven't been able to confirm if it helped me or not since now, my only option is to remove the songs from my library but iTunes WILL NOT allow me to delete the actual files. I don't even get the option anymore.

I feel like I'm being the World's biggest idiot here but I cannot figure this out. I checked my library location and somehow iTunes was pointing to the wrong file location (I didn't change the library location on purpose but I can't say I didn't do it by accident). I updated my library location to point to my external hard drive, but that did not fix the problem at all.

Please Help! This is driving me crazy.

thx,
ian