wp-slimstat-ex on WP 2.5

I have a client running WP 2.3.3. He’s obsessed with having a hit counter (yes, hits) in the sidebar of his blog. I found the wp-slimstat-ex plugin, which conveniently came with an easy way to to just that. Recently he asked me to upgrade him to WP 2.5 but in my testing, I’ve found that wp-slimstat-ex throws a fatal error when I try to activate it. My client has thus requested that I skip the 2.5 upgrade if I can’t make the hit counter work. Unfortunately, there’s no sign of life on the developer’s web site, so I’m wondering if anyone worked with this plugin and gotten it functioning on 2.5.

Now, a different angle: I’ve emailed back and forth with the guy who made wp-slimstat (notice the difference) work on 2.5 and he sent me some code to add the hits to the sidebar. I have it running just fine on my dev server, but I’m 99% sure that my client won’t want to restart his hit count at zero…and I haven’t the skills to import the wp-slimstat-ex stats into wp-slimstat, as the DB setups for the two are different. Does anyone know a way to pull this off?

Thanks for any feedback you can give!