If you have two textareas, one has a rotation value besides 0 and the other has no rotation value or a value of 0 and you 'tab' focus from the one w/rotation to the one w/out. The border around the textArea w/out rotation will be rotated. If you set the rotation value of the non-rotated text field to a non-zero number, even 0.01, it fixes the problem, this causes tons of other problems in text rendering though so its not a solution.
I found setting the focusThickness style to 0 removes the border, which is a good solution but not a great one, anybody got a better one? Here is some sample code:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<mx:Application xmlns:mx="http://www.adobe.com/2006/mxml" layout="absolute">
<mx:VBox width="100%" height="100%">
<mx:TextArea id="source" width="100%" fontWeight="bold" fontSize="20" height="50" rotation="5" />
<mx:TextArea id="dest" width="100%" height="50" />
</mx:VBox>
Here is what it looks like: