I've been emailing with Arteleis towards hopefully fixing my corrupted wallet.dat file.
I've tried everything that's been suggested, and believe the fault has been isolated to my wallet.dat. Some process that writes to it has probably corrupted it. The devs will examine my wallet and debug window and hopefully will be able to address whatever the cause of the issue was in the next qt update.
With any luck at all, this problem will be fixed sometime soon.
On an unrelated note, make sure you check out this great article on coindesk regarding altcoins like Silkcoin:
http://www.coindesk.com/need-altcoins-can-get/?utm_source=CoinDesk+subscribers&utm_campaign=7d9d8daacf-EMAIL_RSS_CAMPAIGN&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_74abb9e6ab-7d9d8daacf-78909885We are doing a lot of things right. As the software becomes more stable, etc., our focus will have to shift into PR for us to be successful. More to discuss on that later, when the time comes.

The camel marches on!!!