10.5 bugs and upgrades
They haven't fixed the DST bugs yet? I though they had. Are you running 10.53 or later? If you are, this is appalling. It's not as though DST is some obscure thing only 50 people in the world ever encounter.
As for switching off the auto-updates, go into the preferences, down to 'Security' settings (No, I don't know why it's not listed under 'notifications' either) and set auto-update to 'Do not check for updates'. I'm not sure if this will stop checking for updates to the browser.js file too, which is best kept updated for an easier life.
Opera 10.5 has truely been a terrible release, with so many little bugs in the UI rather than serious bugs in the rendering engine or stuff like that. They really are focussing on W3C standards too much and forgetting all about how important the shell of the application is. you know, the side of the program the human being actually interacts with.
I wonder if it's in any way connected to the board effectively ousting (for want of a better, more PR friendly word that Opera themselves would probably use) their founder/CEO and putting in an outsider?
Management at Opera has always been a bit second rate (and I say that objectively as a fan of them - Just look at their handle on PR and getting themselves into the press), something which they may have got away with when they was a small team of 16 friends in a small office. But they're a small, floated multinational operation now with hundreds of employees, and the company's output seems less joined-up with every new release. Attention to detail has suffered.
Honestly Opera, it doesn't matter if one particular component of your product is so well made that it's the first to pass the Acid3 test, is the fastest to process Javascript or the only one in existence to do CSS counters (which was true 10 years ago). If it crashes on a Mac every 5 seconds or UI features are annoyingly buggy to Windows users, or it can't even handle DST in its mail client, it's not going to go down well.
And after all that blinkered focus on the rendering and W3C standards, they still have security holes in them! Go back to giving the UI and features as much attention as the rendering component and Javascript engine, and stop breaking features and changing the behaviour of features for no apparent reason or benefit. Those are why I started using Opera. W3C compliance is only as relevant as the proportion of sites that comply too, so come up with a balanced product again.