Exactly!

None of what you described ever happened.

Absolutely none of it.

I mean, try to imagine the steps required just to export "Favorites - Top 50" and produce a file that has incorrect entries.

And that's just one problem with your scenario.

If and when it happens again, I'll try to pay more attention to what happened before.

It would require scanning of a folder containing the playlist files and the paths on the playlists to be incorrect (not where the file actual resides).
Otherwise MediaMonkey won't import Playlists and it also doesn't auto-created playlists.

I don't think I know what you mean.

Let me give a specific. I have a playlist called cb_01 in the root folder. It has 387 tracks in it and I can see those tracks when I click on it. But somehow I now have a playlist with the same name, cb_01, in my imported playlists folder, with 0 tracks.

I have not manually imported any playlists ever since I deleted all of the lists in the imported playlists folder a couple of weeks ago.

I only scan one folder for my music library and it contains no playlist files at all.

Can you describe the steps I would have to take to create this situation?

Probably exported Playlists being scanned. Playlists will scan empty if the file paths on them are invalid.

so, I recently deleted all playlists from Imported Playlists and have not imported any since then. But I recently noticed that there are several playlists in there that have no songs in them and have the same names as my main playlists (those in the top level playlists folder). I don't see any pattern as to why this set of playlists was put into Imported Playlists and I have no clue as to how they got there.

Any ideas?

oh, and one of the phantom playlists is called Imported Playlists , and some of them are named like some of the system playlists like Recently Added and Favorites - Top 50