Amember and Joomla User Table Issue

Last week I began the installation and configuration of Amember. Everything seemed to be working well until I tried to install the Joomla integration plugin.

I installed the Joomla mambot plugin and Amember configuration tried to sync with the Joomla jos_user's table, I received the following error: "Illegal mix of collations (latin1_swedish_ci, IMPLICIT) and (latin1_general_ci, IMPLICIT) for operation '=' in query: SELECT MD5(am.pass) or MD5(CONCAT(am.pass,am.login)) = mos.password or ENCRYPT(am.pass) = mos.password or am.pass = mos.password, am.login, am.pass FROM amember_members am LEFT JOIN cntybldg.jos_users mos ON am.login = mos.username WHERE mos.id='0'"

In order to try to resolve this problem, I changed to collation type in the amembers_members table to latin_general_ci from orig_swedish_ci. Making this change made the error go away, but I have found that amember is not updating the user's table in Joomla.

I am able to register the user from the Joomla front end, but once the registration is complete, the user is unable to login to Joomla (and they do not show up under users). However, they are are able to login through the amember directory http://www.xxx.com/amember.

Did I do something wrong by changing the collations to match?

Your assistance is greatly appreciated.
David L