Please help - primary key column's auto_increment feature is going wild

[David Potter]

Hello, I have a mysql database with a table called "cust".  The primary key column 
custid is of type int and has the auto_increment feature which has been working 
perfectly for months. The auto_increment feature set numbers as high as 21700.    But 
suddenly, it started over, setting numbers like 1, 2, 3 etc.  The only recent change 
made is that a developer deleted a row in this table he should not have deleted, so we 
restored this table and all other tables from a previous MySQL dump.  This is really a 
huge problem because custid is the customers account number that we give to customers, 
and we can not tell customers that their account number is "1".  This will make use 
look very bad.
Any ideas ?

Here is the table definition:

# MySQL dump 8.13
#
# Host: localhost    Database: debtpros
#--------------------------------------------------------
# Server version 3.23.36
#
# Table structure for table 'cust'
#
DROP TABLE IF EXISTS cust;
CREATE TABLE cust (
  custid int(11) NOT NULL auto_increment,
  client_status varchar(20) default NULL,
  firstname varchar(30) default NULL,
  lastname varchar(30) default NULL,

  .....

  PRIMARY KEY  (custid)
) TYPE=MyISAM;