I am sure it is a dirty cheat, but I just used the html to call the avatar directly in my navbar, then added width="25%" height="25%". It seems to work perfectly. For those with no avatar, the space is just blank. I would really like to use the default avatar instead though, I haven't found anything to do that in anything even close to the current version and I have a lot usergroups, so ....
<crossing fingers you'll put it all together for us>