I pressed the artist button in the popup1 menu and thats when it went haywire. Later this evening while still in the same shuffle, another madonna tune came up to bat so I doubt that could be the case.

Assuming that Madonna was spelled correctly in both cases, then that's not it.

say this because I'm not familliar with the hate function and don't know EXACTLY what it does...

It does pretty much what you'd expect it to do.
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Tony Fabris