It seems that when I was a good web citizen and made all my pages nice and standards compliant via liberal use of DOCTYPE I apparently instructed IE to please ignore my CSS settings (come again?! HTML 4.01 Transitional *should* understand the margin: auto construction). I can fix it when I get home by changing the DOCTYPE into something else, unfortunately, the bloody page validators will complain unless I both fix the DOCTYPE into say XHTML 1.something *and* self-close all my meta and image tags.
Grr, grr, and grr…
… that blows no one good.
I finally fixed my layout woes. After I had diagnosed the problem (bloody IE and its bloody standards noncompliance *grumble grumble* do you have any idea how long I defended you against Firefox *grumble grumble* how about showing a little loyalty here) I was able to fix the whole problem by passing my entire web directory through an XTML cleaner-upper. Which reminds me that this project would absolutely not have happened without the following. I hereby pledge $20 to each of them “in the indefinite future, when I have the money to spend”, because I’ve gotten that much use and more out of them and I am feeling in a profoundly appreciative mood to people who save me time at the moment.