i find this incredibly annoying. any way to turn it off?

This doesn't affect your request, but I've found that this feature kinda grew on me. I didn't like it either when it first took place.

i actually didn't mind it at first, but lately it's just been bugging the hell out of me. i switched to google chrome, and i feel like they show up quicker now.

It wouldn't be so bad if it restricted itself to just over the text instead of the entire area where the text is. It makes it harder to get rid of it that way when you don't want to see it.

Yeah, this feature is very annoying.

I guess I don't notice this much since I tend to keep my mouse pointer to the far left or right of the screen.

I find that it's a convenient way to learn more about the content of a post, esp. when the wording is vague. The preview box is small, non-intrusive, and takes a second or so to appear (at least on Firefox). Am I missing something?

For what it's worth, that is my optinion, too. If I didn't like the function, I'd not mouse over thread titles i.e. I'd just head straight to the threads I wanted to read and click them open - which is what I mostly do anyway.

that's a lot easier said than done, considering it's not just the thread titles, but their entire cells. those cells take up ~75% of my browser's window, so like TomOpus said, you'd either have to keep your mouse at the far-left or far-right of the screen.

When perusing titles/pages, I do usually have my cursor at the side of the screen and use my mouse to scroll down the page from there. It's just what I got used to doing. So the problem, as originally stated, hasn't ever really impacted on me.

I'll certainly draw this thread to IB's attention but I can't see resources being employed on a technological fix to something that it seems could be avoided by a slight change in where one parks one's cursor.

I'm told that this has been discussed before with IB - not sure if it was here or elsewhere - and the answer was as follows:Maybe not what some wanted to hear but it's deemed to be for the greater good.

It would be more useful if the mouse-over showed the most recent post and not the first/oldest.

I wrote a greasemonkey script that moves the thread previews from the entire cell back to the thread title. If you're using the latest version of Google Chrome, you should be able to install this directly. If you're using Firefox, you'll need to install the greasemonkey extension first. I have no clue if it will work for any other browsers though.

Since the script runs after the page is loaded, you may still see the popups for a second after the page is loaded.

THAT is awesome. just installed. thank you!

No problem. If there are any other forums you visit that use vBulletin I can add those as well.

That is damn genius! Mucho Gracias!

Here's another "solution" I've stumbled across, although it could be something of a hassle.
The mouseover doesn't happen when I'm not logged into the site.
So you could do your thread reading logged out. But then you must log in when you want to write a reply to a thread.