stevesh:
I'm not seeing any difference between the two ...
if you notice the bad sidebox has a border, an additional top box, and also the green bottom border.
I did figure it out by using Firefox. I had an old .css file that I renamed but forgot to remove .css off the end of it. It was overriding my legitimate css.
for those troubleshooting issues like this, download firefix and follow these steps:
The easiest way to figure out what is where is by installing the Firefox browser and the Web Developer plugin for Firefox. You can use those to see where in the stylesheet you change the styling of the various page elements.
Ctrl-Shift-Y will allow you to hover over a section of the page and see the class and id names for that section in the box at the top. The statements in the stylesheet that begin with # are id's and the ones that begin with dots are classes.
Ctrl-Shift-E will open the CSS editor and allow you to edit the stylesheet and see the changes in real time without changing anything permanently. A very handy tool.