BuddyPress doesn’t let you set or view the avatars in the wp-admin areas, so that’s a bit of a red herring. So, when you go to upload an avatar, how far do you get? Can you crop the image and save it OK? And then there’s just nothing in that person’s profile picture (“mystery man”?)?
Have you tried looking inside your wp-content/uploads/ folder to see if the images are being saved?
Are there any error messages in your web server’s PHP log file?
Are you running on multisite, and if so, if BuddyPress running on blog ID #1, or?
