Note that if you had ANY LINKS AT ALL to the autonumber field, you broke all of the links when you erased and then renumbered the field.
Further, this kind of treatment USUALLY means you are using the autonumbered field for a purpose inappropriate to that kind of field. An autonumbered PK is supposed to be unique and generally increasing but there is NO GUARANTEE of monotonic increases. There can be gaps. If you can't handle the gaps, you should not be using autonumbers.