Okay seems to be solved with help from member of Opera's own My Opera forum.
For any fellow sufferer his answer was
"Try playing around with the position of Appearance - Toolbars - Progress Bar."
I gladly just turned off the Progress Bar completely.
Otherwise Opera is now browser of choice -- no longer crashes and is quicker than Firefox -- and though Google Chrome is faster I won't accept any download from Google these days.
Since accepting an update to Opera 10.53 I am plagued by the address bar and adjoining forward/back refresh and Home icons jumping about.
It's caused by some new feature that replaces the address bar temporarily and instead displays pointless data about speed of connection and what it's connecting to.
The result of this jumping about is that I occasionally click the wrong back or forward button with unpredictable results.
Anyone know how to turn this new nonsense off.
I've reported this as a bug (which presumably it isn't) but I know from experience that Opera techs are quite combative and may rise to the bait.

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