Issue: Recent changes widget behaves weird

Yes, that number is the count of undisplayed updates since the page loaded. You can click the number to display the hidden updates. I'm not sure if there is a problem with the styling of that notification under XenForo, or if there is a conflict with other elements of your style. I will have to mess around with the widget myself and get back to you on that.

Our devs never liked truly live updates, when the newest update is always at the top. It gets really annoying on a busy site when you're trying to read and everything gets pushed down. This is especially bad in a small widget like this where only a few items can be viewed at once without scrolling. When it was truly live, on some tests the current view was completely pushed down and lost until the scrollbar was used to try to find your place, often unsuccessfully.

So we opted for the Twitter-like functionality, where at the top it alerts you there are new items. This way you only refresh the widget when you are ready. The current method will not be changed. If you don't think it adds much, I believe you can disable the "live" part of the widget in the corresponding sidebar block's config.

There is a display issue with the notification in the default style, as the notification is on a different line or div.

Fixed in the next release. The style was actually messed up across all platforms. Beginning with the next release, it will use the style of the navbar notification balloons, except inline with the heading, so not a balloon, and a little larger so that it's noticeable.

The XenForo-like notification style for this case has now been implemented across vBulletin 3 and 4 as well, since it is more noticeable than the previous styling.