The characters you are seeing are what happens when you do a dump of non text data from the database (in this case avatar pictures). There are a couple of solutions.

1) Toggle the settings in your ACP so that all images are stored on disk instead of in the database. This will remove the need for the avatar table altogether

2) I have never used mysqldumper, but the program it is based on (mysqldump) allows you to set --hexblob so that binary data is hex encoded (removing the weird characters, and most importantly the quotes). I assume mysqldumper will do the same.

I've read in other posts on the forum that mysqldumper and other php backups will also cause this problem.
Apparently the best way to avoid this problem is to restore by SSH.

Would someone be kind enough to guide me through this process? I'm using Putty on XP Pro and want to restore the database on my local machine.

Backup:
http://www.vbulletin.com/docs/html/m...nce_ssh_backup

Restore:
http://www.vbulletin.com/docs/html/m...ce_ssh_restore