Ok I understood probably half of that! Yes by exclusively I do mean using that one selector to control those links.

Are you saying that there are multiple classes controlling different elements in the template, so that if the styles are broken or don't conform to the layout, there is a fall-back system?

Or am I on the wrong path with this?

This would make sense as to why I don't seem to have control over some elements.

I mean I understand that you can have multiple elements controlled by a single class, but I wasn't aware you could have multiple classed assigned to the same element.

So in this case we have:

a.category-top:visited {} and a:visited {} controlling the categories link colours?

So which one wins, and is this repeated over the template and does this make it harder to track down what changes what?

for instance Keneso's suggestion to change .sideBoxContent {
background-color: #ffffff;
padding: 0.4em;
}

To get the desired height in the category links just doesn;t work for me.

And trying to add a background images requires a custom Sidebox php file which re-assigns the classes to different selectors?

If so doesn't this make it extremely hard to track down the actual class that's controlling the element?

Logicalstep