Well, I'd be happy to swap issues with you, because I DO have the "delay loading of background tabs" selected, but they all load, which is NOT what I want at all, as it slows down opening & closing Opera, and runs up my RAM & CPU Usage big time! Maybe the key is to select the opposite of what we want in the preferences, maybe if I not select it, the background tabs won't open, and vice versa. But it is quite odd that we are both experiencing Opera not doing what we've selected, really odd...

I have no answer, but there's an extension that would help.

Tab Suspender