Did you try repairwallet (optionally preceded by checkwallet) and also the -rescan commandline? salvagewallet seems to be a last resort effort to try to recover your keys from a corrupt wallet.dat... may be a bit heavy if you just think you're missing some transactions or you've forked.
yeah but repairwallet didn't solve the issue... in the end, I redownloaded the blockchain.
If you were mining on a fork you haven't really "lost" as much as 25k GRW - difficulty on your own fork would have been "piss easy, finding every block"

you're right, but still lost over 12hours of mining... the "lost" 25k GRW was what made me realize something was off
