Yeah, I reset experimental flags and that did the trick. I had to confirm on another laptop where on the screen the buttons were that I needed to press and voila!
So step one is to open Opera and move your mouse over where the address bar would be (you'll see your mouse arrow change to the cursor symbol) then paste "opera://flags/" without quotes and hit enter.
Second then click the "reset all" button which is located underneath the address bar all the way to the right. Your mouse will turn to a hand/pointer finger when hovering over it. Click it.
Finally there is a "Relaunch" button down in the right corner and again you'll know your over it when the mouse turns to a hand. Click and wait for Opera to relaunch and if you're lucky all will appear visible next time.
If I recall I had changed to openGL at some point in the past so that was probably it if I had to guess.