how to recover an inconsistent repository?

[Abraham D. Smith]

I have an 18-month-old Hg repository, and 'hg verify' gives me a pile of
errors like this:

node 26158e945a8ff9ddbacad67efe2247b8a733f240 in manifests not in library/Ash/Algebra/0Front.pdf

I'm fairly certain that what happened is this:  A couple days after
initializing the repository with a bunch of old CVS stuff (without
history), I must have (foolishly!!) manually deleted a bunch of files
from .hg/data to clean out some big files I didn't want in the new
repository.   

Those deleted records haven't been touched at all for 18 months, and
about 700 revisions have passed to other files without incident.
However, the manifest and the data are not synchronous.  It seems that
this messes up a lots of exporting that I might want to do now. 

At the time, I could have just started over and re-imported, but it is
far too late for that now.  Any ideas on how to get this repository to a
reasonable state?

I briefly tried the "punch" patch, but it seems to break since the part
I want to punch out is essentially revisions 0 to 3.


Thanks,
Abe