Question : Problem: correct method for culling unwanted songs in iTunes

I obviously don't get iTunes, so I need some help.
I  installed a newer, bigger hard drive on my computer.  I had iTunes on my original, small hard drive.  Before I added the new hard drive, I attempted to clean up my iTunes.  There were a number of songs that were duplicates or had too high or too low a bit rate, so I highlighted all the unwanted songs (manually  tediously, using the ctrl key), then R clicked, delete.  Itunes asked me if I was sure, YES, did I want to send them to the recycle bin YES.  I did not empty my recycle bin.  After  I set up the new hard drive, I planned on copying my CDs with the music I wanted at the bit rate I wanted.

 I installed my new hard drive, and set it up as my primary drive.   I installed iTunes on the new primary drive - I am going to use the old drive for back up.  I copied the old iTunes music folder from my old hard drive and pasted My Documents so it is My Documents/Itunes Music.  I did not want to put the iTunes folder withiin My Documents/My Music as I have a bunch of music in there that I don't want iTunes messing with.  I then told iTunes on the new setup to look for the iTunes folder in My Documents/iTunes.  I let it consolidate the new folder.

Now I have ! exclamation points on about 5% of my songs.  If I use Windows Explorer to look inside the iTunes folder, those songs dont exist  its not like the link to the song is broken and I need to re-establish it  most of these are songs I deleted just before this change, but a bunch are songs I deleted a while ago.  But the entries for those deleted songs have re-appeared in iTunes.  In the past I have tried cleaning up iTunes -sometimes it seems to work, other times the deleted entries re-appear  its obvious I dont get iTunes.  So, before I go and try to manually highlight and delete these songs, I want to know how to do it so I stop wasting my effort.  If I manually highlight these exclamation songs and then delete, will they come back again?  Is there a 3rd party utility for Windows that can do this edit more efficiently and permanently?  I dont think iTunes allows you to sort by ! exclamation point so you can easily do a block highlight and delete.

Answer : Problem: correct method for culling unwanted songs in iTunes

I was hoping to avoid installing a 3rd party utiility, but as I got no responses here, I found Dupe Eliminator.  I googled it and found no negative comments, but I did not find any positives either.  It cost $35, but the cost was not the main issue - I am leery of gettng a product taht is useless, or worse, ridden with spyware.  It seems to have done a good job - I actually WAY underesteimated my dead link songs - it was closer to 30%.  It sorted those and allowed me to re-sort them to easily do a block delete.  Likewise, it did a very nice job of identifying duplicates, and was smart enough to differentiate between slightly different versions of the same song (live or extended versions were not lumped together with an album version).  I'm waiting to see if the dupes or deadlinks re-appear, or worse, if I get some spyware infection.  Compared to the boatload of time I spent manually deleting (and all for naught), the $35 was pretty cheap.