Some more notes on this issue:

The nodes that are effected are generated by the PopulateOnDemand ajax call. nodes generated in the normal pageload display correctly.

Safari is also effected by this issue, although it exhibits a slightly different behavior. in both Opera and Safari, dynamically generated nodes that contain html in the nodes Text do not display.

Thanks Jon,

I did some tracing of the code in firebug and dragonfly (opera's version of firebug). I didnt get very far, but I did find something that may be of interest:

dnn.controls.dnntree.js on line 273:
    var sXml = oTNode.node.getXml();

in firefox, this getXml() function returns an already encoded string:
        "<n txt="&lt;a href=&quot;/Home.aspx?Loc.........

in Opera, this same function returns an unencoded string:
        "<n txt="<a href="/Home.aspx?Loc.........

I suspect the problem lies somewhere in dnn.xml.js and is probably incredibly simple.

I'll look into preencoding the text for just those two browsers.

thanks again Jon.

P.S. for the next version, it would be nice to fall back to a staticly built tree if javascript is not present (i.e. by using postbacks to expand nodes).