The top area ajax popup module description works perfectly for every module except News.

I tried it in the demo site and it works perfectly there, so it must be something I've done - I have no idea what! Can I have a pointer as to where the function is called so that I can check through any changes I've made there?

There is a bug in the module description mouseover javascript seen in the site header; it breaks when you use quotes. Here is the solution.

It seems that the use of "quotes" breaks it. If you want to fix this (as I just have for the 1.21.1 build), open up class_templates.php at #1570 and change the following:

        $data['module_mo_description'] = addslashes($data['module_description']);

To:

        $data['module_mo_description'] = addslashes(htmlspecialchars($data['module_description']));

This converts the quote into a HTML entity and will let it pass through. I have tested this in our demo, and you can now see that the News module description now also works with quotes.