1) I uninstalled, removed all opera program directories, reinstalled and still had the problem. So, after doing an uninstall, I ended up having to go to the app data directory (C:\Documents and Settings\Administrator\Application Data\ AND C:\Documents and Settings\Administrator\Local Settings\Application Data) and delete the Opera directory.
2) After deleting ALL opera data from both the program directory and the app-data directories and reinstalling, the phantom history entries no longer appeared.
3) All bookmarks are included in this ‘history search’ list. I didn’t realize that at first. Upon a fresh install bookmarks are imported from IE / FireFox and thus I was seeing addresses even on a new install. But, I was now only seeing bookmarks and not year-old entries.

the ghost addresses is a very remote problem, in my case, probably due to two opera installations on the same machine (a proper release and a beta version) at the same time.
As well as I can see, the ghost history dates to that time.

I’m pretty confident that the current version of opera, with a normal simple installation, will give you the privacy satisfaction that you need.

You just have to test it, you know, check if it’s not keeping this history, so you can put your fears to rest. Opera is a major browser, and of great quality. This is a pretty remote bug and I’m convinced this issue (whatever it is) doesn’t exist anymore, at least, for the logging part.

I did previously (last year, on a different computer, long since reformatted) test my pages with an older version of Opera, and that will have to suffice as far as browser compatibility goes.

I don’t want it on my new computer if it keeps records that can’t be deleted.

Okay maybe I’m a little paranoid, but this past year of trying to get used to all the security things in Windows (and Linux too, I don’t see much difference between them — they’re both very complicated OS’s and they both have ridiculously HUGE numbers of mysteriously-named files just to run the OS) is bad enough as it is, compared to the ancient primitive OS’s I was previously accustomed to for many years, where the user had pretty much control of what info was stored, and files (even “invisible” files on antique Macs) were easily able to be deleted, even by relatively non-expert users, if they chose to do so. If there were a way to delete this “ghost” stuff in Opera (running under Windows) I’d go ahead and install it. Otherwise, not. Dorne and Marc-O seem to indicate that the problem can’t be solved.

Well I guess I won’t be testing my site’s webpages for Opera compatibility then. Maybe it doesn’t matter, as the pages validate to W3C specs with no errors and the HTML code is relatively simple anyway (no Javascript, no fancy stuff) but it would have been nice to test the sliced images etc., for compatibility with new versions of Opera. (I use sliced images as part of a somewhat admittedly simple-minded strategy to make it just a little bit less easy for low-life thieves to hotlink my images and steal my bandwidth, used in combination with .htaccess — unless they want to steal the whole code, but I haven’t seen anyone motivated/ non-lazy enough to try that yet).

I suppose I’ll have to rely on Browsercam or something, for Opera compatibility-checking. I’ve never personally known anyone who used Opera anyway, and I haven’t had an Opera browser show up in my web logs user-agent thing in many years, but I do like to maintain compatibility with as many browsers (both old ones *and* the very newest ones too) as possible, just for the principle of the thing if nothing else.

I’ve never been too thrilled about sites that only work in one or two browsers, but break in other browsers. That’s not what the web should be about.

Maria

did it all. All clean - but no change, I still see the ghost addresses.

next step is to grep all my HD….

but

did all of that, and still these ghost urls are hanging around… From what I see, these are about two years old, so that would put me with…. version 8/8.5 perhaps?

I think the last option will be to grep all my HD with some of the urls to find where these are located!