
And then, suddenly, the SMF database is busted, broken, destroyed and finito. Ofcourse I don't get the facts right if during the course of the thread they seem to change, depending on who's talking

In my opinion migrating the SMF database to the phpBB database might fix any possible data corruption that's there, and that's something that I'd like to test, or see tested. If you don't understand anything about database administration, let me explain it to you in a different way... SMF and phpBB are comparable to the engine in your car. If you constantly feed the SMF engine the wrong fuel (data), your engine (forum) might stop working properly in a future. Eventually the engine stops running. But replacing it with a new engine that has a higher acceptance for the fuel that you're throwing into it, might prevent any future engine corruption.. and I think that it's a cheaper option than trying to revise the old (SMF) engine to working order again and accept the 'non-standard' fuel..
You see, data doesn't corrupt by itself, it's always external sources like a forum or even worse, server side disk corruption that causes this. In this case we can only hope that the forum was doing the corruption, because if there's really something wrong at the server side, we may have to go to the king and tell him that the sky is falling in..
Ofcourse, it's easy shouting from the sideline like me, 'de beste stuurlui staan aan wal', as we say over here, but given the fact that I was still in the process of figuring out whether or not you even want the old posts to be here, I take a bit of offense to that statement.
And, looking at the posting that Eth made, it's quite clear that the option of migrating was considered a non or non-feasible possibility.. But I've given you some tools to work with.
Should you not be able to figure this out, I'm happy to help. But then I really need access to the old SMF database to see what our options are...