Andy I do not believe what your talking about has anything to with what I am referring to. I can really only comment on our code. vbulletin code is not our code. We have tested
vb 3.x with vbgallery 2.5 on a clean install NO HACKS and there are no issues at all. There are numerous posts on this issue.
In fact the only issue with vbgallery and the registration issue was a typo in the query line in the code noted in post 65.
Now looking into other peoples sites running code mods I noted as a side note in post 74 that users using hacks I was able to rectify there issue by removing the conditional so that query in our hook runs all the time meaning when someone registers they are always added to the gallery table.
Our plugin hook has nothing to do with the variable you are noting. Basically the query scans the users table and makes sure there is a gallery entry for the user in the gallery users table.