Opera crashes due to Flash/Shockwave plugin

[#1]

Are there any Opera users here?
Since the start of March this year, I have seen crashes when browsing various sites with Opera 11. The worst offenders are IMDB.com and Amazon.co.uk. A quick Google search suggests that most people reporting it are in the UK which leads me to believe it is a UK-targeted advert at fault (well, triggering a fault in the Flash plugin). Has anyone seen this? No problems when browsing the same pages in Firefox, IE or Chrome.

[#2]

Flash is a well known source of difficult to solve problems.
Can you block flash - except for sites where you are forced to use it, such as BBC iPlayer etc?

[#3]

Flash crashes on me once or twice a day, it sucks with bells on.
Can't wait for HTML5 video to kill of Flash for good.