I passed this over to my brother, who is good with things like Java and CSS and got him to take a look and he has managed to fix the issue.
It was the NewsFeedTicker’s CSS file that was causing all of the issues.
To get round the main issue of the full article not being displayed involved placing the marquee inside an absolute position container. He then did a couple of other tweaks to get it working fully.
So now when it runs it calculates the length of text to be displayed and then calculates the speed in which it needs to run to display the text over a 60 second period (as 60 seconds is what I have set as my update interval in the config file).
As soon as the 60 seconds is up, the text has finished displaying and it moves on to the next article, So no more displaying the same item multiple times in a row.
The only down side to this is if you use an RSS feed that displays a lot of text, it’s going to fly across the screen really fast, in order to make sure everything is displayed within 60 seconds.
I’ve found most news RSS feeds have a fairly short headline and description and the speed is perfect.