I've been having this weird behavior with the HTTP remote administrator port.
It hapens with 0.84 and 0.84a too.
I've configured VLC so that the HTTP remote administrator will be in port 80. That works ok. Then I set it so that when VLC is opened it'll automatically open the HTTP remote administrator. But when I go to the configuration and see what port I want to set it to it says 81. It looks like it has detected that the port 80 is in use and goes to the next port, but it doesn't seem to know that it's itself that's using that port, so if you change something in the configuration and save it, even if it's not related with the that port, it changes the HTTP remote administrator port to 81.
I think that should be checked out.
I hope that I put enough info. Ask me for more details if you need more.