I found a thread that solved my problem perfectly with ONE hitch. I wanted different link, hover, active colors etc. in the side boxes than globally on the site. So i followed kobra's thread and added:

#navColumnOne a:link, #navColumnTwo a:link {color} and the same for hover, visited, etc.

and although I have different link colors set under

h3.leftBoxHeading :hover for instance, it is changing the Headers TOO and I only want to change the navColumn colors NOT the headers on the side boxes too. Is there a work-around?

so I want different colors in the nav sideboxes and different colors in the headers on the sideboxes, and it seems the navColumnOne is overpowering everything else.