I gave up and downloaded Opera Developer. No more crashes. I simply synched the new Opera with my account and all was working as before. A pain but worth it. I am hoping the next update of standard opera fixes things.

I have solved this vexing problem by trial and error. It's a right royal pain in the backside but I found a simple fix. Go into "settings" and the go to "browser" and then "system". There is an option for "hardware acceleration when available". Click on that choice and your spinning pointer goes away. Hooray!