I have an old .asc file that recently used to decrypt some old files of mine. the asc file basically contained armored ascii of both my public and private key, it was made with pgp 8.1. anyway, I imported it into my gpg keyring and was able to decrypt the file, but then I decided to export both keys from gpg and I noticed that the armored ascii for the public key that gpg spit out didn't match the public key in the .asc file. The private/secret key was the same though.

I expected both exported keys to match the keys in the .asc file, is it ok that the exported public key is different from the one that I imported? why is it different anyway?

I hope that this reply gets you some help.
Have you tried http://www.gnupg.org/documentation/bts.en.html#gpgweb ?

The home page also has other references that may help you out.