OK that's really weird ... Can you doubleclick one of those and look in the Advanced tab? This basically has the raw key-value pairs from the tag file ... Do you see anything that has the name of the artist in there -- if so, can you send me the key name that goes along with it? Are ALL of your artists gone or just the ones from a particular playlist/etc? Can you tell if there's something weird going on in the advanced tab like a space in front of or at the end of the tag name "artist"? Maybe I'm not trimming spaces and Emplode is or something silly like that?

ms