It’s not malware. As this is my work laptop and has VPN to the corporate network, it is tighter than a bug’s ass as a matter of policy. Must just be a quirk of Opera 9.5.
I would like to know exactly what’s going on, though - out of curiousity. Very strange bug.
I see it on IE7 with Vista. The message I get is address: “http://img89.imageshack.us/img89/3697/flashydope2xs0.gif”
Created today, 01/23/2008. Interesting. Flashydope? 
Could be some plug-in software for your browser interfering. I know Cool-Iris screws up some flash pages for me.
Shrug
Is it just the active browser window or some portion of it, or is it a swath spanning the entire width of your monitor?
The SDMB is one of the more generic and browser-agnostic sites I’ve run into. Some CSS, a sprinkle of Java, but no Flash or similar stuff to clutter things up, so I don’t know what a plugin could be tripping over here to start things blinking.
Hate to block you from going down that road, but it’s not Opera, either. I use Opera exclusively (current and latest stable version is 9.25, although I haven’t tried the 9.5 beta), and this hasn’t happened to me, whether on Mac or PC. My guess is that if it’s not some malware on your system, then it might a combination of browser and wonky video driver. You might try updating your video driver to see if that doesn’t take care of the problem; or, if there’s not an update for it, uninstall and reinstall the driver.
In almost all cases, the table element defining one single post, as in the first example. (The only exception to this is the second example, where the “flashy” part from the original flashy post seems to carry over onto the reply box - but it keeps the original dimensions.)
Because it’s only associated with individual <table>'s (or maybe <div>'s) on this board, I don’t think it’s likely to be a driver issue. We’ll see how it goes with another flavour of Opera. 
Again: Everyone will see the flashing effect in the first link. The first link in the thread is supposed to flash, and we know exactly why it’s doing it. It’s an image the OP created of the flashing post, to illustrate the problem. The question is not whether or why the image in the first post is flashing; the question is why the original thread that image was made from was flashing, for the OP.
Maybe some kind of web developer “debugger” plugin? Maybe something that highlights DOM elements under certain circumstances (e.g. ill-formed HTML)? Do you have anything like that installed? Just a WAG.
I’ll be damned. It’s happening in Opera 9.5b. Never saw it in any of the stable versions, but the most recent beta finally produced the flashing post that Larry Mudd has been seeing.
A bug report will have to be submitted with Opera, 'cause it isn’t the vBulletin code producing this.
Oh, frabjous day! I’m glad it has been narrowed down and duplicated.
I look forward to browsing the Dope with the last version of Opera, unmolested by blinking blinkiness - when I can be arsed to making that change.
