DB inconsistency, adjustmens and book photos missing. Restore from Vault?

I'm really stuck here and need some advice as to what to do.

A couple of days ago, when my computer woke from sleep, it said that one of my external hard drives (out of three) had been improperly removed. This seems to happen to me once in a while. Anyway, it prompted Aperture to say there was an inconsistency in the database and that I should quit and then rebuild it by holding down opt-cmd while launching Aperture.

I did this, but got the same problem a few others have gotten. It hangs while saying it is recovering a project. Even if leaving it there for several hours.

Interestingly, I found that, as others have, you can actually choose quit on Aperture's icon from the dock, despite the fact that a dialog is active. When doing this, I very briefly, before the program appears to crash, see another dialog swing down behind the one saying it is recovering a project. Sometimes the error submission report pops up then and sometimes it doesn't.

When I go back into Aperture, it will eventually get through all those libraries being rebuilt, albeit one at a time, with a quit almost every other time as it hangs on a project.

So, it appears to rebuild things ok, I see all my pictures. But when I click on the project that I'm desperately trying to finish, I notice that all the metadata appears to be missing. No adjustments, no captions, no ratings, no keywords.

Also, the a book that is part of the project appears fine for a split second when I click on it. But after the pictures being there for a split second, they all switch to gray boxes and there are no photos in the browser section of the book project.

My Aperture vault is recently updated, so I feel good about that. But I guess what I'm wondering now is should I just restore the library from the vault? The user manual's information about the vault is kind of scant, and I've also seemed to find some posts on this forum that indicate that certain metadata will be lost on a restore. I just want to get back to work. I've already wasted a couple of days being very cautious about this.

I've tried restoring this database so many times with nearly the same results every time. It's quite frustrating to have this not work.

If I do the restore from the vault, I won't be able to have the old Aperture library on the same hard drive. There's only 20 GB free and the old library is 40GB. Of course, I have noticed that it's been growing each time I try to restore the library because it seems to be regenerating thumbnails.

I hope that perhaps somebody out there has some good advice for me, so I can finish this up and move on. Thanks.