Are there any common configuration settings in PhpMyAdmin that could lead to the display of cryptic characters?

Cryptic characters in PhpMyAdmin could be caused by incorrect character encoding settings. To fix this, you can try changing the character set and collation settings in PhpMyAdmin to match the encoding used in your database. You can also check the configuration file (config.inc.php) for any settings that might be overriding the default character encoding.

$cfg['DefaultCharset'] = 'utf8';
$cfg['DefaultConnectionCollation'] = 'utf8_general_ci';