[CyberAlien]

From my experience with forums, I'd say most people that use fixed width use it only to have some fancy logo they have designed that cannot be expanded. Some designers make only fixed width designs (including very good looking ones) only because they can't write valid html for fluid design as fixed width is much easier to code; such designs usually have invalid html that looks awful in non-IE browsers.

I disagree that fixed width designs have better readability - it all depends on how layout is designed, not on width. If design has parts that are just design elements that attracts user attention (such as flashing images, images with very high contrast to background, etc...) and that aren't part of content then readability will be bad no matter what width is used. And if page is designed to have content in easily readable format, such as postbit_legacy where posts are on one side and useless content (user profiles) is on other side, and there aren't any distracting elements, then page would be easy to read regardless of page width.