but have a look at highlighting the tracks one by one and right clicking (on windows anyway) and selecting information. You should see some track x of ?? cells on the bottom right. Make sure these are correct.

Sorry if that is a little vague - at work and don't have itunes to look at.

I have had the same problem on a couple of albums and the following seems to work:

Right click on first song on album and choose Get Info
Select Info tab
Put in Track No 1 out of 10 etc
Repeat for rest of album

Hope this helps

even if it's totally reputable, but there's an invaluable bit of freeware called the Stamp ID3 Tag Editor which tidies up tag discrepancies and allows you to re-tag albums (including their artwork) en bloc. It's light, safe and ridiculously easy to use.

You can download it from tucows here:

http://www.tucows.com/preview/505721

If you look at your albums in "cover Flow" mode, do you see the album appear twice? If so, iTunes is deciding from the tags that there are two albums there - it doesn't just make the decision based on the name. The two fields that are most prone to problems are (as others have said) the number of tracks on the album, and the Album Artist field - this one doesn't need to be filled in but sometimes is, which causes the problem. To sort things out select all the tracks together click Get Info and edit the offending field (or fields).

...but I'm afraid nothing seems to work. I have a Mac and have tried the Mac equivalents of the above. I don't think a re-tagging program will work as on the Elbow album, Fallen Angel is tagged as track 2, but is automatically sorted as if it were track 11.

I think I'll have to get someone in, or try Apple help. Either that or buy the CDs instead as they will download onto iTunes in the correct order!

Thanks once again for your suggestions.

In the iTunes search box, type "Elbow cast thousands".

(This should leave only the tracks for this album in the main window).

Select all the tracks for the album, then make a new playlist from the selection.

(on a pc, you click on "file" to bring up the menu options).

Click on the new playlist you have made (which is probably called "Elbow - Cast Of Thousands".)

Click on the "View" menu, then select "View Options". Make sure "Track Number" is selected.

This should let you see if the track numbers are wrong.

You can also try clicking on the headers of the columns in the playlist - this sorts the tracks based on the column (e.g. time, album, etc).

If some tracks on the album have the "disc number" boxes filled while others have them blank.

If some have the "part of a compilation" box ticked.

If somehow a rogue space has appeared at the end of the album title or artist name in some tags, or any other minor spelling/punctuation discrepancy.