A few questions, should be simple :) (Forum width & Category Strip)

[gluc0se]

Hey guys, doing some work, coding my first template. Trying to learn through exploration, but I have come up with 3 questions so far, left unanswered.

First:

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I have set my overall forum width to be 840px but it stays at 100%. It will respond, however, when I change its dimensions to 50%. Any reason this might be happening, and tips on getting to to change to pixel dimensions?

Also:

I am changing the category strip a bit and have run into two problems. The first is, I added a td, preceding the first td, to add a nice decoration image before it displays the category. It looks great, but has about 1px of cellspacing in between. I don't want to take away the cellspacing out entirely, but is anyone aware of a way to cover up this spot (I have been trying to slide a <div> with the background over, but that angers the cellpadding :-p) or squeeze it together?

Lastly:

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On the same topic, at the other end our .psd has a nice graphic "under" the button to expand and retract the forums. I have been messing around a lot with this, but, again, the cellpadding gets pretty wacked out when I throw an image in there (I am actually surprised it breaks through the CSS attributes), and the unique structure of that file makes it hard for me to just throw a td in at the end, like I did in the front.

Thanks a lot for the help guys, I really appreciate it!
Edit/Delete Message

Hey, got the first two, anyone got an idea for that last thing? Thanks