IE, why do you always do this to me?

I got it working by moving the banner into the table cell on line 11. It broke some other stuff though. header16.jpg needs to have the sides trimmed and the padding needs to be removed from .border

To be honest I'm not sure what's causing the problem in the first place. It could be IE's weird behaviour around whitespace (spaces, returns and tabs), or just some default padding/margins on tables that need to be disabled.

For me, looking at the code: it's not much fun to work on code that uses tables for layout. You're obviously still learning, and that's cool, but you might get more interest and help if you try to use CSS controlled layouts. Don't worry about it straight away, but learning XHTML+CSS is definitely something to put on your list of stuff to do.

Thanks for taking a look, ireally appreciate you taking your time to assist in sorting out my mess.

PS: Is there any way to have a part of the code specifically for 1 browser type(ie:IE) but that will be ignored by other browsers so that, that piece of code will only be used by 1 specific browser. Hope that makes sence.

thanks

You may find Internet Explorer's Conditional Comments useful.

I avoid CSS hacks precisely because they are likely to evaporate in future browser releases.

I prefer using browser sniffing code and changing the styles on the fly with JavaScript.

Yes, some people have JavaScript turned off - and they are used to seeing weird lookin sites.

Furthermore, I take some time to write code that is cross-browser compatible without hacks or adjustments whenever possible.

You can determine what browser people are using with a script (PHP, JS etc) and serve them CSS or content depending on what the result of the check is. But that's a lot of work for what it is worth.
Some people do this, but IMO it's not really worth it, unless perhaps the site is some sort of showcase for webmaster abilities (etc).

As you learn more about CSS and the different browser requirements, you will learn to work around the various issues and differences between each browser, and make code that will work well on all browsers.
This does occasionally mean you have to compromise, and sometimes have layout or a style not quite the way you would have liked it. Although that is not very often.

I avoid using any hacks of any knd, as browsers get updated, changed and develop the hacks no longer work, or return different results.
Hacks are exactly that, a hack. They work by doing something that is not within the browsers true design and intended usage, so they get updated to "resolve" the hack issues. As such I don't think they can be relied on.

It's okay to "hack the dead" though. Ancient browsers are not likely to change. Of course, conditional comments let you avoid hacking IE anyway.

What is your opinion on browser-specific CSS properties, like Microsoft's "zoom" and "filter"?