Remote Buddy in fact uses your iTunes Library.xml (and some AppleScript on top of it) to build and present the built-in browser for your local music library.

Podcasts are especially tough to handle, since iTunes doesn’t refresh the XML file on every status change of an item (i.e. „listened to episode“) and also doesn’t provide any notifications when the status of an item changes.

The next time you come across an entry from a podcast that you no longer subscribe to - or an episode that’s no longer in your library - please open the iTunes Library.xml file in TextEdit and search for it. Then, please let me know:

a) if you found it in there 
b) how long ago you removed/completed the podcast/episode

I’ll then gladly try to reproduce and isolate the issue.

Thanks in advance.

Best regards, 
Felix Schwarz