I reported this in T41314 Metaphorshear is working on it... I also said in it how to workaround until it's fixed.

Yes, arrows were never clickable, but the scroll wheel selection worked up to the last stable 270a. To reiterate what I said in T41461(so you don't have to look there too), the scroll wheel selection now only works when the mouse is in the text entry field, not anywhere in the menu.

I was going to report this as a bug but didn't know what was causing it! but I can confirm the behavior - each 'blink' and redraw is quite slow for many edge scenes, making the viewport preview a real bottleneck.

There's a few menus that don't display shortcuts correctly... the pivot point for example is the same way.

Thanks Bastien!

Limitation??? a face is a face, and an edge is an edge and a vertex is a vertex. When you select a face you are also selecting four edges and four vertices. When you select an edge you are selecting two vertices as well. When you select two adjacent vertices you are also selecting the edge between them. if you select four edges that make a face you are selecting that face. if you select two of the edges of a face you are not selecting that face, but if you switch to vertex selection mode you are now selecting that face because you have selected all the vertices belonging to that face. It's not Blender, it's geometry.

You're doing it wrong... you should be in edge select mode for using 'edge collapse' usefully, and you should understand the difference between edge rings (ctrl alt click) and edge loops (ctrl click). What you are trying to do is easy and quick in edge select mode, impossible in face select mode.

Pretty unclear what you are doing, but at a guess you are creating Ngons and trying to loop select across them. Loopselect will terminate at junctions where the direction is ambiguous. This is IMO not a bug, If you still do not understand what it is doing post a more detailed description - hint: when you say 'outer four faces of a torus' people can only guess which ones you mean.

Confirm this bug on win64 hash169c95b, also when trying to move any bone in edit mode. Basically you can enter and exit and select in edit mode but that's it. No extruding either. Also in 9073a81 and 29e8c46 and 169c95b(2.71RC) Tested with factory settings as well, same result. Can be reproduced with just one bone, move, rotat, scale or extrude, shortcut or menu, immediately closes Blender

Confirming fixed in build be980b9. Now the outputs of the VC2008 and VC2013 builds match the 2.70a output. Build 064ef3f (Graphicall) still has the problem. (Just for reference.)
Thanks Thomas and Brecht! Now I can fire up and smoke away...