wow, I'm digging up an oldy but I finally figured out the cause of this and how to fix it because it happened again today. What lead me to the solution this time was the newest version of phpMyAdmin. Back when I first posted this phpMyAdmin didn't throw any errors, it just rendered weird. This version sent out some errors instead. Turns out that if the mbstring and mcrypt extensions are not available strings get parsed incorrectly (in Wordpress and phpMyAdmin) giving the strange results I had. After enabling those extentions everything was fine.This time and last time I was working with a fresh install of php5 and had forgot to enable some extensions.Hope this might save someone else some grief.