Hey, Wantsuccess:

Sorry to hear about another frustrating GMAT attempt!

As far as your question about "is four times too many", I'm reminded of that old axiom/prayer: "Help me to accept the things I cannot change and give me the courage to change the things I can..."

You're not getting into a top business school with a score <500, so you really don't have a choice but to take it again - you need to work on: 1) Accepting that as the reality and the best that you can do, and 2) Changing your score on this next attempt!

If you can turn things around and have a story ready for an essay or interview as to how you did it, that will play well with some admissions committees. The key is change - you need to change the way you study, change the way you think about these questions, etc.

What has been your strategy thus far? My intuition anytime that people reach that level of frustration after so much hard work is that you're likely "doing" (more problems, practice tests, etc.) and "memorizing" (more formulas, tricks, idioms, etc.) but not "thinking" enough.

Go back and analyze your practice questions and practice tests and see if you can find reasons for why you're getting things wrong - are you making similar mistakes over and over? Are you missing the point of certain question types? This is a real-live b-school case study for you - you need to determine some causes for what's going wrong, and then work to find solutions. The community here should be a fairly big help...but I'd prioritize that search for the causes right now over all else. Help us help you!