watch folder errors; playlists disappeared

I noticed that the new Watch Folder feature was only correctly importing about half the songs I download. The rest of them appeared with the .mp3 title as the song title, but no data. It seems to particularly have problems if Songbird is open while I'm downloading the file, although I'm not sure that's exclusively the case.

After reading up on it, I thought the best way to fix this would be to remove the songs from the Watch Folder, then replace them. I tested this by moving one track out of the Watch Folder and back in again. Voila! There it was. So I tried it again with the whole batch.

Not surprisingly, this resulted in duplicates in the Library, so I ran Exorcist to remove them. Null tracks and generic error messages kept appearing, and I quit and restarted Songbird several times. Several minutes later I still had almost all the duplicates (Exorcist didn't recognize them), and all my playlists had completely vanished.

I've got Songbird 1.2 on Ubuntu 8.10, and I am using Music Manager in a separate folder from the Watched folder.

Two questions:
1) What should I do about Watch Folders not working correctly? I'm not seeing any other issues like this reported; do I just have a buggy install?
2) Is there any way to retrieve my playlists? I've made a lot of changes since I last backed them up.