I tried to unzip it using winzip and it said it was not a valid archive

See Mark, that is why I gzip things

Your browser is probably mangling the file. I seem to remember there being a windows program named GetRight that is supposed to work in these situations. Anyway, you can try the uncompressed version, but that may get messed up also.

What could I have done in the process of rebuilding my corrupt database that would cause this problem?

I suspect you have duplicate playlist fids at this point. Did you ever run Mark's fidsift.sh script to rearrange your files? If not you can probably safely remove any directories on your empeg beginning with /empeg/fids0/_0 and /empeg/fids1/_0 and your player will go back to a more normal state. I would try moving or renaming those directories and see what happens.

-Mike