Daniel,
Yes, I did have a backup, and thanks, it's now fixed.
So what one has to do is simply use Preferences to point to a new location for the Library, and then use the Consolidate command.
The thing that was tripping me up was that I was then deleting the Itunes directory from my main HD. Wrong. You can only delete the music files themselves, to recover disk space, not the other Itunes files.
Thanks for the help.
Michael