Only way I could think of is if we could get a copy of your corrupted nick.db, but first, you could check the file size. If it's something like 0, then somehow it got cleared out. You could delete it and start over with no nicks and that'll be fine.
I was only being preemptive when I mentioned the complaining, I wasn't assuming you were going to complain, but there are people out there who probably would've done so, even though it is the dev branch.