VB opacity problem

[iamacyborg]

Hi, I'm trying to make the main content areas of my forum partially opaque, using CSS3 rgba values.
I set the background values of the page with the following code:

background: rgb(40, 40, 40);
background: rgba(40, 40, 40, .8);

That works fine, the page section becomes partially opaque and the background image can be slightly seen.

Now I try to make the other sections (category, header, footer, 1st +2nd alternating colours, etc) fully transparent so that I don't have overlapping opacity values, but it's not working, and just shows a black background, like so. This image is with just the category strips modified, everything else is unchanged.



So that didn't work. I then tried using a fully transparent png image and using that as a background for the category strips. Made sure I'd reset the cache on my browser and still got the same thing.

If anyone's got any idea about where I'm going wrong, I'd really appreciate the help.