The original implementation of VisualAge Smalltalk did not support class instance variables. When this capability was added (many years ago), the class definition template used by the standard browsers was not updated. In an image without VA Assist loaded, the class definition template was:

but in an image with VA Assist loaded it was:

To reduce confusion, and to enable identifying class instance variables without editing the template, the class definition template used in standard browsers is changed to match the one with VA Assist loaded.

If any of your application code is sensitive to the content of the class definition template, you may need to update this code to account for the new class definition template.