[Aken]

Korinth: It looks like you have a background color set for the Small Font section of your CSS. If you remove it, it will fix the footer and Mark Forums Read bar background issue. If you don't wish to remove it due to it complicating other parts of your style, you can edit the templates directly to fix it. I can tell you how if you like. I'd recommend removing it from the CSS.

As for the background, first let me say that I'm not sure if you're confused or not, but the background you are trying to use is not a gradient. It's just a square image that can be tiled as a background.

If you are trying to get that image to go across the entire background, do the following: first, remove the background from the PAGE area, as it is not necessary. Then in your BODY CSS box, remove the "repeat-x". It will make the background repeat everywhere all across your site.

Hope that gets you further