Thanks for the reply blackbird71! I prefer to start Opera by resuming an earlier session... I 've tried everything you said but again the same problem. I will format my laptop anyway and this will fix the problem. I've always postponed it and now with the Opera issue I will format it. Thank you!
One other thing to try (before going all the way to a reformat) is to go into your Opera profile folder (the same path as the bookmarks.adr file shown under Menu > About Opera), turn Opera off, and delete the vlinks4.dat file; then go up into the \sessions subfolder and delete the autosave.win file. Then restart Opera.
These deletions will remove the sessions history from Opera upon restart (so you will have to assemble the sesssions again manually by visiting the pages used before) but they will also sometimes clear up certain weird kinds of "hanging" behavior that get embedded from preserving prior sessions records. "Sessions" records are separate from Opera's cache records, so corruption or other problems can sometimes carry over in either place.