moving sideboxes around

You currently have a px value for the horizontal position, which causes problems for anyone with a different window width than you have right now. This is probably also the browser effect you noticed, as different browsers may give different useful widths for the same screen width, and certainly will if their windows are set to different widths.

Okay. I think get it now.

still not perfect. When I place it where I want it for my browser it's generally in the same area on other browsers but not exactly the same.

Sorry. the above isn't exactly correct...It's identical on my screen(15.6 ws) with both Chromium an FF. But on my wife laptop(4:3) the livehelp overlaps the currency/language selection (in both FF and Chromium). So it's seems my trailing issue is regarding the screen size and not the browser now that I've got horizontal as % and not px.

Anyone?

There must be a way of placing things regardless of ones screen resolution and/or screen size? There's something I'm obviously not grasping here.

If you absolutely position something with the right or left edge at exactly 50%, it will stay in the same place on any screen. A flexible width page will always risk undesirable spacing or overlap of these elements, though, as other elements move around.

So I should pick a res and make everything fixed then if I want to maintain consistency throughout?

That would be easier.
I faced this issue in my jewelry site's home page. I carefully positioned elements to not overlap at the lowest resolution I wanted to support while not leaving too many gaps at the highest resolution. Then I added max-width; and min-width: properties to #mainWrapper.

Actually I guess that wouldn't really do it either.

Before I started playing with placing the chat sidebox every element looked the same in all resolutions. I understand the 50% positioning, makes total sense. But what about the wrapper idea? Shouldn't that have kept the relative position of everything despite the different resolution?

If #mainWrapper is a fixed width it would, but not necessarily if it can expand.

Okay. I finally got it. It's not perfect but I went with putting the chat sidebox at %50 and playing between 1024x768 and 1680x1050 and the gaps aren't so bad. I don't imagine anyone running higher than that would maximize their browser window anyway.

Thank you so much for all your help!