I observed that on 3 different Dakar installations. With or without modperl. In firefox you can see that the colors in the web list are missing. In IE the alignment is messed up in the left bar.

What's so special with that VAR thing?

All you need to reproduce it is to have the following line in your page:

   * Set VAR = AgeOfTheCaptain, 39

Having that in a form field do not seems to corrupt the page. So that bug report is not corrupted. However you can have a look at TWiki:Codev.ReproVarBug.

Sorry, but VAR is simply a very bad name for a variable because it is a veritable predefined TWiki variable (see VarVAR).

You can overwrite TWiki's predefined variables, but only in very few cases this makes sense. Most of the time this happens unintentionally, as I guess in your case.

I'll have to discard that item. Please choose another name for your variable, and check out TWikiVariables for other pitfalls.

I see now what was going on with the left bar being corrupted. The VAR defined in the page overrides the predefined VAR thus when the left bar tries to get the colour for each Webs using VAR it only gets the value of VAR. Funny one I'll change my variable name.