Yes, you can turn it off. Go to Settings > Start Page > Turn off "Show Speed Dial suggestions." Hope that helps.

Can somebody help? I can't get My Flow to load in the normal Opera window, it seems to be stuck (spinning circle indefinitely). However, in a Private Window, it loads just fine. Thanks!

@therealfakeness I have this same problem! Did you ever figure out how to fix it? It doesn't look like anybody replied here. Does anybody know how to fix this? Please help. Thanks!

Nope, spoke to soon. VPN still causing stuttering.

In case anybody was wondering, this seemed to be a problem with my ISP. Today, I was having a really tough time connecting to the internet at all. I called my local ISP, and they reset something on their end and now not only is my internet back up, but my Opera VPN seems to be functioning like normal.

Problem:
About a week or so ago, I started having this problem. It is most noticeable when loading pages, while playing YouTube videos, and/or typing anything in the address/search bar. When loading pages, the load seems to pause every second for a second. With videos, the audio plays smooth, but the video is choppy, like it is buffering for a second every second. When typing, the text sometimes appears after a short delay. I don't know how else to describe what happening except "stuttering." But like I said, VPN used to be smooth and fast up until about a week ago or so.

Band-aid Fix:
If I turn VPN off, everything is smooth and fast again. Turn VPN on, stuttering.

What I've tried:
1- I tried creating a new profile, completely deleting the old one.
2- I tried completely starting over from scratch, uninstalling opera (a few days ago), making sure all the folders were deleted (profile, cache, program). Restarting computer. Re-installing Opera and rebuilding everything.
3- Changing VPN setting. Doesn't matter where it is set to.

Setup:
Windows 7, Dual Intel Xeon E5506 2.13GHz, 32GB Memory, 512GB SSD for OS, 2TB HDD for Storage.
Using MKLINK to redirect my Opera cache folder to my HDD storage drive.

Please help!
Thanks,
James