Sunny is still active; he just approved some pull requests about 2 weeks ago.  Most of the news/announcements are now being handled by the community.

The error you're receiving can happen if your copy of wallet.dat is corrupted or unreadable.  You may not have to re-download the entire blockchain.  Try removing the wallet.dat and restarting.  Also, make sure you have full read/write permissions on the entire .ppcoin directory and the wallet.dat.