Oh Ryan M, I guess you may have done this already but I thought I'd post anyway.
Regarding the bightness transition on avatar hover, and the green text in sig.
I couldn't figure out why the text was fading in and out so I just copy and pasted the whole lot into an empty html document on my site and it's seems fine.
http://www.indecentcode.com/test/forum.html
I cant be sure but, maybe it's related to scratchpad?
As you may have guessed, I have been making use of your work
Also, I'm not entirely sure how it works, but I'd like the partyhat of my avatar to be coloured black. I tried doing that myself but the attempt was rather unsuccessful.