Hello PH8,
I don't think it was you or the miscellaneous thread. I was getting the same weird results yesterday morning too. Some plain white pages, odd messages about span, and some weird formating of the board, where every line of print had a white frame around it. For a while the message list was in table format, with a white background.
I thought John was changing things again. I was ready to post to him "please change it back !", when I couldn't get it to work at all. I gave up for a bit, came back later an all is well again. (By the way, I never even try to open that Miscellaneous thread so I don't think that was part of the problem.