1 - I assumed that I'm lacking something that enables me to see these effects, since I never got that first changing logo, and now I have no idea what everyone is talking about with this sliding or tilting or whatever.
Let's put it this way: Microsoft's Web site gives conflicting information with regard to the transition I was using for the logo and the page transition that slips the current page to the left whenever someone clicks on a link to another one of the forum's pages (what a surprise, considering that on more than one occassion I've had to hunt up sites that have no connection whatsoever to Microsoft to discover ways to correct problems that Microsoft admits exist in their software but conveniently avoids including a fix for (like Windows' undocumented setup switches and such) - but I digress
). One section says it was compatible with IE4 (and later), whereas another section of the site says it was designed to work with IE5.5 but will work with IE4 only if someone has upgraded IE4 to use some of IE5.5's features, which in turn may cause IE4 to behave unstably. (Please someone explain to me why anyone, knowing it would cause IE4 to act unstably, would upgrade IE4 to use some of IE5.5's features instead of just going all the way and upgrading to all of IE5.5's features? :-/) So the most probable reason you couldn't see the logo or can't the current transition is because you've never installed the upgrades from Microsoft that are needed to see them.
2 - If that's all I'm missing, I don't know if it's worth getting the update. All is working fine for now, just that I don't get the fancy effect. Is there any other particular reason why I would need an update?
Currently that's all you're missing. But as I said (although I just realized it was probably in a post that's no longer on the forum) I'm going to be adding some new YaBBC style "toys" soon for all of us to play with in our posts. They may or may not cause problems for you if you don't upgrade to IE5.5. I suppose we'll see...
3 - Any idea of the size of the download? I've been holding off getting a new computer for a while now. The main reason to need one is lack of hard disk space. I managed to clear a bit of room the other day, but I'm still avoiding any unnecessary downloads.
I just checked Microsoft's site to see how much hard drive space it would require for you to upgrade to IE5.5 for Win95, and they say anywhere from 6 to 17MB, depending on the number of files on your sytem that need to be updated. From the way you've spoken, I suspect you'd probably need an amount of free space that's closer to the 17MB than it is to the 6MB.