Tony, you do know in the time you took to make that gif, you could have started to learn the basics of CSS enough to find the offending table surround tag and asked me to kill it... :-P

I did kill it, not realising I blindly pasted it in doing the upgrade. I restored the icons from the old board as well (artifact of the clean install I did). Lastly, found the CSS id for the new tags to change their color to orange from white.

The rest of the things, well, doubtful much more is going to happen. It was pretty much "put the board back to 5.5". I know people got used to seeing it that way for a number of years now, but it wasn't the first time the look has changed. And I know why you want it to say (8 new). An easier way your little VB app could work is just to parse the HTML for "newposts.gif" or "nonewposts.gif". Or, enjoy RSS feeds once that gets put in.