Manually adding user to database; Can't login with user

[consolegaming]

I'm afraid we don't manually insert users at the moment. I do quite a few other things manually but that's not one of them. We had started to come up with a Registration script but at the time (a few years ago) it was just taking too much time to do trying to replicate the whole registration process of activation codes and then activating them. So we scrapped it and just linked diretcly to our registration script lol. And our login form just posts to the forum's page.

[auctionguy]

Ok I got it to work finally using the manual way. Then I tried it again and it didn't. I don't understand.. The variable holding the md5('actual password') is what it should be, however the hash of the salt plus hashed pass (md5(md5(actual pass) . salt) is not coming out to what it should be. Could apostrophe's in the salt be causing this?

Here is code for the password part. Note that the salt has already been generated. The data['password'] contains the correct password, I have checked. I have checked every step to what it should be up to the last where its going wrong.

PHP Code:

$vbsalt = mysql_real_escape_string($vbsalt);
$vbpassword = $data['password'];
$vbpassword = md5($vbpassword);
$vbpassword = md5($vbpassword . $vbsalt);
$vbpassword = mysql_real_escape_string($vbsalt); 


EDIT: I've ran a few tests and it appears that apostrophe's are the problem. Any user with an apostrophe in the salt doesn't work, any without apostrophe's works.