if "Gold" support means that they should support your "hacked" version, then i would ask for money back for all the time you paid for "Gold" support. Did you put in the "hacks" because the "Gold" support didn't quite shine? just noted that the script is named a .php script...why the reference to perl then?
if you can narrow down the time period during which disaster struck, then have a look through your web server logs for any unusual accesses to the script. if you've got logging turned on in your database, you'll see the the update transactions that close all the topics.