signup IPN vars not included in WP database

I have long stuggled with “payment skipped” messages from PayPal and in my most recent attempt to troubleshoot I discovered something very interesting. I have 163 paid users, but only 127 of them have the meta key of “wp_s2member_ipn_signup_vars” in the wordpress database. As you know, this contains the details related to their monthly subscription.

It turns out, these 36 paid users who do NOT have this key and value in the database are teh very same customers who come up time and time again as “payment skipped” via PayPal. i’m wondering is it because without this information PayPal can’t properly charge the account?

What I don’t know is why this would happen. This is not a batch of users similar in any way. they all came in at different times and at different price points and they were signing up at the same time as some of the users whose accounts are functioning just fine.

The other strange thing is that there IS data on these customers in the paypal-ipn log files. Can you help me troubleshoot what might be going here?

What I was thinking I could do to “fix” all of these accounts is manually add in the necessary key and value info to the database…but I’m wondering maybe there is a more sophisticated solution.

Thanks,
Joe