Hi again Ray,

Thanks, I got your answer.

The css-d folk are absolutely terrific if you can ask something that grabs their interest, and especially if you can put the problem into a test page so they can deal with it in isolation. They've done some wonderful things over the years. But I have found that if you ask them about a Zen Cart problem that can't be isolated, then there's no answer.

To get this thread back on the problem at hand, I wonder if we can simply force this to behave in an old-fashioned way. After all, the problem bit is a TD and we used to be able to force tables to load politely. But the brain cells haven't thought that way in a long time, so bear with me while I think it through out loud.

So, having started up Aardvark in FF, I see that the bit that draws in the middle and then shifts over is identified as td, id: navColumnOne, class: columnLeft, style: width: 150px;

The TD is both IDed and classed, so it could be further defined in the style sheet. Or that hard-coded style could have something added. And it's inside the main Table with an id of contentMainWrapper. Maybe we can hit that too, since my site has a fixed width. A table with a declared width should reserve that much space while the page is being drawn even if its contents aren't yet known by the browser, shouldn't it?

So I'll go have a look at the stylesheet and see if I can specifically force the table width and see if that helps. I shall report.

Rob