StyleSheets Hate Me

I've been pulling my hair out (I'm bald now) trying to get stylesheets to
give me a certain effect. I have a page that's layed out (with a table)
like the following:

------------------------------------
|                                                          |
|                                                          |
------------------------------------
|                      |                                   |
|                      |                                   |
|                      |                                   |
|                      |                                   |
|                      |                                   |
|                      |                                   |
------------------------------------

I have a text-link menu (in it's own table, in the bottom left cell) that
I'm trying to control text becoming visible and hidden in the bottom right
cell. (Each menu option on the left would bring up a paragraph and a few
links on the right.)

I've got the hidden/visible part worked out, but here's the problem. I have
the above entire table in a one-celled table of 565pixels wide, that's
centered on the page. Because of this, the pixel coordinates of the bottom
right cell in the above picture are different depending on screen and
window size. So I can't tell the paragraphs to show up based on an absolute
pixel.

What I want to know, is if there's a way to make the paragraphs place
themselves from the menu in the bottom left cell?  It's not necessary for
the layout above to be in separate cells, as long as the layout ends up
looking the same way.

Any thoughts, hints, suggestions would be greatly appreciated.  (You can
view my temporarily aborted attempt at
http://www.nmu.edu/www-sam/cont_ed/new )

I also noticed that despite setting text styles for font face and size,
there's still a huge difference between Mac Netscape, and Windows IE. I
thought that setting a pixel size was supposed to help get around that?

<sigh>

Nathan Lyle
 ( natlyle(at)nmu.edu - http://vm.nmu.edu/~natlyle )

     "Every day is a journey, and the journey itself is home."
        - Matsuo Basho

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