It can mean a lot of things, usually on the album there would be another asterisk somewhere to explain what it means. I've seen it to mean a track that was recorded live, that a track is the censored version (eg. without explicit lyrics), or that the track is the "single" or "radio" version.

Thanks for the info.
The thing is, in this particular case at least, what prompted me to finally ask, is that it existed in every single file--which begs the question, Could it actually be an album with only bonus tracks?

thanks again

This may be related to AllMusic. They use "[*]" in the titles to indicate that the track was a bonus track. So if you've done any tagging through them (or other sources that use a similar method), then that could be where they came from/why they're there.

At times I see a music file, as it's title, named something like,
We Hate You (Little Girls) [*][Version]
or
Mother Spunk [Live][*]
and I was wondering why place a star within square brackets: what could [*] possibly mean?

thank you