And BP seems to point back to the wp theme developers on the avatar issue. Here is the only string I could find on the subject. It had to do with the WP theme Salutation:

(BP Customer says) Philipp said on August 16, 2012

The update to 1.6.1 doesn’t fix any avatar issues I have with avatars since I updated to 1.6 with Salutation theme (AND BP Default). It’s all the same – Buddypress loads always another avatar size. Sometimes …-bpfull-16×16.jpg another time -bpfull-24×24.jpg and all of them are resized to 80×80 by CSS. That just looks awful… ;(   Is there still a problem with the avatar fix?!

(BP response) Boone Gorges said on August 16, 2012

Philipp – BuddyPress does not create avatars of the form -bpfull-24×24.jpg. This must be a customization by Salutation.

The avatar fix in BP 1.6.1 had to do with displaying the URL vs the HTML img entity, and was indeed fixed.

Here is my message awaiting moderation today on BP site:

Wesite: vitalitydirectory.com

Using BP 1.6.1 with Theme Dutch’s theme MikMag. Also having issues with cropping of avatar images. Theme Dutch says it’s BP, and I see that BP says it’s the theme. I just need to understand how to fix it or work around it until the curlpit is found. It generally stretches the image to really close up or half a face if you don’t use the crop tool at all… and the crop tool can’t be used or you get hair, an eye or a forehead only. Go to my site and search on my profile: Beverly Carroll or view the footer where you see many of the avatars. Some few are OK b/c it was before issues! We have tried all different sizes of original images with limited success…not something you want to offer a paying member as an action item for them to fuss with!

On the thumbnail slider, I took it down b/c it looked odd but put it back up so you could see it on the home page: vitalitydirectory.com. It is the Special Shortcode named Accordion-Carousel Thumbnail slider that pulls from the blog images. Love the slider, but some images were skued!

Hello Mike and Le Nur,

This is the vitality directory architect Michael Quale.  Beverly has asked me to log into her account here to help with the avatar issue. I have spend a considerable amount of time investigating this issue with the principals at vitality directory. I have come to the conclusion that this IS a THEME related issue.

We have switched the sites theme to use the default BuddyPress Theme and the avatar sizing and cropping works just fine.  At this point the responsibility lies with your development team to fix this considerably HUGE bug in your theme code. I can be reached via Gtalk or email at michaelquale@gmail.com

Thanks for your time.

I have most of this avatar issue figured out.

First:

change-avatar.php lines 33 to 37:

<img src=”<?php bp_avatar_to_crop() ?>” id=”avatar-to-crop” class=”avatar” alt=”<?php _e( ‘Avatar to crop’, ‘buddypress’ ) ?>” />

<div id=”avatar-crop-pane”>
<img src=”<?php bp_avatar_to_crop() ?>” id=”avatar-crop-preview” class=”avatar” alt=”<?php _e( ‘Avatar preview’, ‘buddypress’ ) ?>” />
</div>

The avatar class is used throughout the site and causes the crop tool to be tiny and messed up.

Change class to a class of your own, in my case, vl-avatar

Create class vl-avatar:

img.vl-avatar {
float: left;
margin: 0 10px 10px 0;
}

Then change class below:

<img src=”<?php bp_avatar_to_crop(); ?>” id=”avatar-to-crop” class=”vl-avatar” alt=”<?php _e( ‘Avatar to crop’, ‘buddypress’ ); ?>” />

<div id=”avatar-crop-pane”>
<img src=”<?php bp_avatar_to_crop(); ?>” id=”avatar-crop-preview” class=”vl-avatar” alt=”<?php _e( ‘Avatar preview’, ‘buddypress’ ); ?>” />
</div>

Finally,

wp-content/themes/Mikmag/css/1140.css Line 77 :

img, object, embed {
max-width: 100%;
}

This is effecting the avatar cropping tool and forcing the cropping image to be re-sized to the tool itself and not to the original picture on screen.  The highlighted cropping image floats left and is 100% cropping tool width.

If I remove this from 1140.css everything works fine, but you loose reactivness of theme images throughout site.

Final Question: Where do I go so I can remove the inherited css from the crop tool image that is highlited in the crop image.  I think it may be here: bp-core-avatars.php lines 569 to 583.  Any Ideas, try it yourself and see.

Well at least most of it is figured out:

Let me know what you find out at vleverenz [at] gmail [dot] com.