After trying the alleged "fix"several times, I think I know what happened to my files.
When I ran the upgrade the very first time I had the "Automatically update album art and media information" box checked. I thought, "hey, when I used V1 it went out to the Internet, found the information or not, and didn't mess anything up - it'll work the same way now - right"?
Wrong!!!
This is what did the dirty deed. All of my old files that did not have complete metadata are screwed up.
Zune software should not automatically overwrite anything in the metadata in the individual files - ever!! Do you hear that Microsoft?? Leave my files alone! Create a seperate update database that Zune can use to display what YOU think the updated data is but do not ever write into my original files unless you ask permission to do so on a file-by-file basis!
You could pop up a prompt "differences were found in the metadata, review and update now?" or something similar.
So, it seems that I have a major task ahead of me to go back and un-do what the new software did to hundreds of my old MP3 files that didn't have complete data in them.
I suspect that there is an error in the update process whereby it does not clear out what it had in some of the fields from previous files. It re-uses the data from a previous file and this is how the wrong data got onto those files that had no data in the fields that were being updated. Major database programming error!!!
Clear the deck completely before working on a new set of data Microsoft! Remember "garbage collection" from the early days????
This is database management 101 stuff!! I would fire the programmer who did this today if I was his manager.
So, I expect that the only way I will get my files back to the way they were is to spend hours of my time going through all of them and then reloading them all into the Zune software again.
Since some people have had success with this experience, I suspect that I will eventually be able to fix all my files.
So much for time to relax during my Thanksgiving break.
-Bob