I have a client whose site mysteriously looked messed up one day.  After some digging, it turned out that all of the WordPress text widgets were removed.  Thought that was an odd thing for a human to do, so I suspected that there was a correlation to a plugin or theme.

Long story short – if you are recreating a WordPress database and MySQL Workbench gives you a popup like this:

article-missingwidgets

Do not try executing the SQL commands!

That dialog is appearing because there are bad characters in the file.  There is something about the combination of bad data and a WordPress, theme, or plugin hook that is likely the issue.

In my case, the culprit was a plugin titled Delightful Downloads.  It produced a table with bad data that looked something like this:

INSERT INTO `wp_ddownload_statistics` VALUES (1,'success','2015-08-11 11:22:34',56,0,'­ì;Ú','Mozilla/5.0

As a result, I either need to manually prune out that line in any future database exports or I need to find an alternate downloads plugin.