what in the world?

[ranz]

I don't know anything about your board - so only offering some ideas of where to look for the problem. The character set issue is only a possibility (one to consider checking).

Character set issues I've seen before cause this (similar) - usually shared hosting providers don't setup their servers properly to allow for UTF-8 character sets. There are some settings in vBulletin Admin that you can tweak for this - check out the vBulletin Options.

Have you been playing around with your templates?

If it's a new installation - perhaps you could verify that it's installed correctly.

Just some ideas.