my itunes tells me that my music library is locked, the disk is locked, or I don't have write permission. None of that ist rue and I know my permissions are fine. any suggestions?

If iTunes exits in a particular unclean way, it may apparently leave you in a state where future startups will claim your "iTunes 4 Music Library file is locked". Neither Apple nor Google seem to have heard of this particular message before. What appears to be the Right Way to recover from this: copy the 'iTunes 4 Music Library.xml' file out of Music/ iTunes to somewhere safe; move or delete the 'iTunes 4 Music Library file'; start iTunes; import from the copied xml file. Do not import from the xml file in place. If something goes even a little bit wrong (say, the fileserver where most of the files are currently isn't attached, leading it to think those files don't exist), it will still happily import he rest and create a new library file -- and a new xml file, erasing your old one. If you find yourself in this situation, copying back the original library file, which used to be locked, may find happiness for you -- it did for me. Which seems to indicate the lockedness is an attribute of the file itself, not of any contents of the file. What kinds of file-system-level file locks survive reboots, though? (Above courtesy of http://molelog.molehill.org/blox/ Computers/Macintosh/iTunesLocked.writeback)