left colum strange behavior

Ok, so I'm a zen cart noob, and I have a problem like all noobs do. I got a template, installed it, great. Installed all kinds of fancy sideboxes and changed my colors, great. Got excited, made my store a bit wider, and attempted to increase the width of the left and right sidebars (apparently changing them in admin did not work at first so I decided to edit some php files). This is where the problem comes in, chances are I was drunk, and chances are I will never figure out wth I did but hopefully someone can give me an idea.

From admin, if I change my colums back to default 150px, they don't resize on my page. If I edit them on the tpl_main_page, they don't resize. Where else could I go to fix this? What could I have done or where could I have changed things to screw them up so bad. Depending on what category I navigate, to the left hand column changes size. It's really rather annoying and I can't seem to fix it.

my site has adult content, beware, if you go to church it will not sit well with you, http://www.jackinmybox.com

don't comment on the categories sidebox, I'm fixing the colors, just covering this problem first.

ok, fixed the initial issue in the style sheet, now onto a new problem, the content and product listing page seems to squish and expand at will, it won't keep a consistent size from one category to the next, however the category left hand side box and container is now keeping a consistent size, that's a bit better.

I seem to have narrowed the issue down to categories that containe sub categories, but do not themselves contain product. It will show new items in the category (actually in the subs but it's showing it in the parent category, and it will show the category links, but it squishes the center column page down to a smaller size. When you enter those sub categories everything is fine.

In addition is there a way when you select a parent category with no items, it will just display all items from the sub categories unsorted, amazon/ebay style?