auto_incremet jumps to maxnumber...

[wxdqz]

This one is strange.
Have not been able to find any references to anything similar.

I have a table with an auto increment column:

id mediumint(10) PRI NULL auto_increment

I do a REPLACE

REPLACE INTO categories SET
id=\'\',
priority=\'100\',
description=\'interne greier\',
.......

then:
mysql> select id from categories order by id DESC limit 20;
+---------+
| id |
+---------+
| 8388607 |
| 3577 |
| 3576 |
| 3575 |
| 3574 |
| 3573 |
| 3572 |
| 3571 |
| 3570 |
| 3569 |
| 3568 |
| 3567 |
| 3566 |
| 3565 |

As you can see, I got nicely incremented values until this last one...

Even stranger:

mysql> select LAST_INSERT_ID();
+------------------+
| last_insert_id() |
+------------------+
| 16777216 |
+------------------+

Stopping and restarting mysqld does not help.
Doing exactly the same procedure on another copy of the same database on another server causes no problems at all...

Any idea what I could try?

Gaute