One of the most annoying problems I've always had when looking for useable flare type textures is that I've never found one with a proper alpha channel attached that didn't also have dark or light edges around it.

This is a basic flare effect that I put together as an experiment in creating this type of effect from scratch. Scaled down it looks pretty good and will probably find use as it is in a current game project I'm working on. The black background in the preview is just for preview -- the image itself has no background.

I'm including both a scaled down PNG file and the source PhotoShop file.

As a note, the texture is presented as a simple white flare. Using OpenGL this can be very easily recolored. Use the PhotoShop file if you want to recolor different parts of the flare for various effects.