have you tried fixing file permissions in the disk utility?

If the files are showing up red, it means SSL cannot find them. Use the location column to check if the files are where SSL thinks they are.

my bad, I was just going on the lock symbol, nobspangle is correct, as usual :)

Thanks for all of the help on this guys. I have done some further research and found some info that should hopefully shed more light on this. Maybe this can help others as well. A lot of info to read but, lots to report here. Sorry.

nobspangle, thanks for your info. That got me thinking more about location as you were saying. I checked and found that I had duplicate instances of tracks in my library. One with a lock symbol and one good one. I remembered that the locked track was one that I had edited the ID3 tags of recently. Ok, so as nobspangle said, it was an issue where SSL could not find the location of the track. But, SSL did find the track again and reassociated the location with a good track (hence the one good track and one bad 'locked' track).

Today I was moving some new tracks into the library and building overviews for these. When I did this, SSL found the locked tracks and now changed the symbol to the question mark for all of them. Of course, question mark means SSL could not find the file. nobspangle, absolutely correct.

Now what is causing SSL to break the association with my tracks? I think I have that solved as well. I think it is the format of my drive. I run all of my tracks on an external drive, formatted to "Journaled, case-sensitive." With this formatting, I believe that whenever I access a file on the drive, the journalling is moving the files on the drive (part of the journalling process). When it does this, it breaks the file association with SSL. I believe SSL is then re-locating the files the next time I start up and creating the new "good" one. End result, one good one and one locked one.

So, if anyone else has this problem I recommend checking your drive format to see if this is what is causing the problem. Having the drive formatted as "journaled" works good for back up purposes. But for use on SSL, I think "non-journaled" is the way to go. Otherwise, the locked files will appear I think.

As far as getting rid of those locked tracks, you can verify the broken location by rebuilding overviews. SSL should then change the locks to a question mark symbol. Delete the bad ones from your library and you should be good.

Thanks again guys.

I think your assumption is wrong. Thats not how journalling works.

Classic... me and you this week... we'll figure it out!