It's most definitely something you haven't yet looked at. Try it this way, kill something so it drops an item, pick it up and look at your inventory. The item will be sparkling. Look at the details fr that item, then close your inventory. Open your inv once again and it's no longer sparkling (and wont sparkle again).
When you log on a character all the items in the inv sparkle for some reason, but will stop just by using the inv (you will be scrolling past them anyway, etc)