i have two problems here, both which are annoying the hell out of me.

Every few days itunes just refuses to find my apple tv. it just wont do it. no amount of restarts or screaming get it to find it, and the only way is to re-sync my apple tv. Why does it do this, and how do i fix it?

The second problem is that every month or so, when re-syncing my apple tv, i have to re-add all my movies and tv shows into itunes. But when i do this, it means i loose their status on if they are a tv show or movie, and we all know how annoying it is to make them into tv shows all the time

any suggestions of fixing this?

I don't know about your syncing issues - no problems here.

Try getting MetaX to tag your TV show files.
Once you have done that, get info on the files in iTunes and it will update them and now know they are TV Shows. Then in future if you have to re-add them to iTunes, you won't need to go through and change them all to TV Shows in the video type in iTunes

oh thanks, will try that.

i just realised that for some reason itunes decided to revert back to files being stored on my harddrive, not my external drive...grrr! no matter how many times i delete that file it just keeps coming back!

In your iTunes preferences under advanced, have you unticked "copy files to itunes music folder when adding to library"? If you don't iTunes will makes and file it's own copy in the iTunes default location (which you can also check under preferences > advanced.

i tend to try not to change boxes, as it ends in disaster. next time it does it, i will have a look.