on the main page, when you mouse over the ad for the guild, does anyone else have a few noticeable white artefacts remain after you take the mouse away?
The most notable ones are circled but they're all over the place, like dead pixels on an LCD monitor. It seems to be only ad affected so I doubt my flash player is stuffed

By chance do you have any sort of video player active in the background? Because they usually cause artefacts like that when ran due to the overlay and renderer they use.

no, nothing like that, unless its the vista transparency layer and sidebar messing about

I thought the ads were a bit of JavaScript/AJAX rather than Flash.
Tried Vista and various conditions of the Sidebar, all looks fine here.

Oh you're right, they're not flash!
Still no video stuff, the only media like things are the WMP sharing service which I must get around to turning off since I don't use it. The only other odd thing running is the vmware stuff

I get the same stuff although not until the page has fully refreshed. It'll probably change when the top page gets redone with the next offer.

Wow... mine did it too, and I have XP, not to mention a CRT monitor here at work. Also in exactly the same place.
EDIT: Further test: the white pixels remained when I allowed it to go through the slideshow cycle and come around to the Guild again, vanished when I then hit Refresh, and reappeared when moused over extensively again.

I also have this issue.

hehe no problem, if it's a bug and its weird, I'll be the guy to find it.
Don't progressive JPGs have transparency options? If not, maybe the transparency is triggered by a keying colour that somehow got into the image

JPEG doesn't support either one... it's simply yet another IE bug triggered by a terrible implementation that was hacked into an unfit target. I really hope that at some point web developers will unite and say "Enough, we're tired of fixing Microsoft's bugs for them. If you're still using MSIE prepare for the terrible experience you deserve!"

yet another reason to switch to Firefox or Opera or something? I'm a big fan of Firefox, but each to their own.

Problem is, it's not the users who have to pay the bill for Microsoft's awful software, it's the web developers. You have no idea what we could be doing by now if we didn't have to spend two thirds of our time fixing Microsoft's bugs for them.

And that right there is the problem with the Microsoft Mega-corporation.
Their dominance can be viewed as a blight on PC development.
This sort of behavious is unfortunately normal in the world we inhabit, whatever is easy and well-known wins. See further, Google, the iPod+iTunes, Amazon, eBay, etc.
Their initial popularity and ease of use causes a reinforcement which makes alternative models very difficult to launch and maintain. Sometimes a new challenger can break through, but that is far from the norm.

To a certain extend that's normal... but what Microsoft has done is special even for monopolies: More than 5 years passed between MSIE 6 and 7, and that's not saying that development was particularly fast before of afterwards or that 7 was much more than a bugfix release with a new UI.