@Lil Thanks for pointing this out. It looks like when I upgraded the software a it replaced the default avatars with those symbols. I didn't realize that until I read your thread.
Things like avatars are cached by your browser to make the pages load faster so you'll keep seeing the symbols until your browser's cache is refreshed.
Try holding down the shift key while refreshing the page when you see those symbols and it should refresh the cache. If that doesn't work you can manually clear the files from your browser cache. You don't want to clear the cookies, just the files.