Help! Damaged iTunes library, so apps I bought disappeared, and iTunes won't let me re-download them?

(The apps are not listed in iTunes at all—in other words, there is now nothing inside the Applications area of iTunes on my desktop. Before the damaged library there were dozens there, including my two paid apps.)

http://support.apple.com/kb/HT2519

No, unfortunately that’s not working for me. That’s what I meant when I said the app store is only giving me an option to buy the apps fresh. it does not display that message referred to in that article (yes, I have made sure I am signed in with the same account used for the original purchase—the one which displays the apps in question in my purchase history).

Do they show up if you look in /yourusername/Music/iTunes/Mobile Applications in the Finder?

Oooh, yes they do! Thank you! So I just double-clicked each of them and now they are back in the Applications screen of iTunes, and they sync correctly.

Sadly it seems like my data in those apps was not preserved (they’re starting up blank)... do you have an idea how I could re-access that, or is it lost?

(It’s not that big a deal if I have to input the data again—I’m just happy to have the apps back)

Once you’ve downloaded an app, you can download it again for free from the iTunes store an unlimited amount of times, forever. So you can’t ‘lose your apps’, just find them on the store and ‘buy’ them again; you’ll be told that you already own this and it won’t cost you anything. It’ll download just like new and you’re ready to go again.

thanks richardhenry, but I was asking because that was not the behavior I was seeing in my case. as johnpowell says, if anybody else has this issue, you just need to manually re-add the apps by looking in that local folder (named above). There I found my paid apps and all the free apps I had dl’d.