but it leaves the main forum display quite narrow. I'll play with the settings, but I didn't like the results I was getting the other day.

Probably will just hold off until 3.0 rc1

this doesnt work for me. :|

Guys, check out my sites.... http://www.sportsnimports.com or http://www.louisianaclubscene.com/ .... I have had the left tables for over a year on either site now. Here's a small tutorial on what I did, which may or may not help you.

Basically, the header is EVERYTHING that is generated BEFORE the actual forum tables are built from the scripting. All i did was opened up a new file in Microsoft FrontPage, then 'Built' if you will, the idea that I had for my layout (See screenshot). The left column on my bottom table is where all my links/banners are located. The width of this column is set to 145px or something like that. I put a divider column 10px wide after the left column. The width of the right column is set to 100%, meaning every pixel left over on the users screen. This prevents scroll bars in most cases. Here's the trick to making this work for your header/footer. I started in the top left corner of the right table and typed the word "FORUM" here. In other words, the FIRST thing that is generated in that portion of the table, is the word "FORUM" (See screen shot). From there, I inserted my custom Logo, tables, fonts, borders, colors, etc in both the top table and the bottom left table. Now, this is the easy part. View the source of what you've created. I deleted all the BS metatags that were inserted by FrontPage. I started right after the </head> tag, and copied EVERYTHING all the way up to the LAST character before the word "FORUM". Then I pasted that entire selection into my Header template. I then started with the first character AFTER the word FORUM, and copied EVERYTHING to the end of the page there into my Footer Template. Thats it! The scripting inserts all the forum information AFTER the header and BEFORE the footer. What you've done was told it to STICK all that right where the word FORUM was placed in the table. Make sense? Here is a screenshot of what mine looked like just before I cut and pasted it all into my script. Remember, this is not the html code, but a preview in frontpage:

http://www.sportsnimports.com/stuff/header.gif

Ignore the $strings. I use 'includes' in my header to make my life easier. Hopefully you can understand what I'm talking about here. If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to ask them here. I'll be happy to attempt to help :)