Then I used pywallet to dump the keys from the corrupted wallet.dat file that was found. In the wallet.text file that pywallet generated, I found this 51 character key, along with an address. The address is valid and had one transaction as per blockchain explorer all the way back from 2011. Its a miniscule amount, though worth recovering as I am taking this as a learning experience incase I find the real missing wallet.
Does the "
51 character key" written next to
"sec":?
Because that's the WIF prvKey of the address above it; if it's in any other line, it's just a coincidence.
IDK if Pywallet will be able to dump corrupted private keys but since you're copy-pasting and it's invalid, then it might be the case.
But it's the encoding that's the issue and raw prvKeys in wallet.dat files aren't base58check encoded, perhaps it's an issue in Pywallet, try an earlier version.