Weird forced transparency with the primary menu?

So I am doing a major overhaul to a sub-theme with the marinelli theme. Actually its beginning to turn into more than a sub-theme as I move things around and customize it all. However, the main menu has been untouched, only moved. The attached picture demonstrates my problem. The site background is the striped portion behind the 3 images. The menu background refuses to extend the full width of the content area. The icons (a block added to the location) will not display a background either. There is some black whole feasting on my rendering of marinelli that leaves it all transparent.

   <?php if($mainmenu): ?>
    <!--start main menu-->
    <div id="navigation-primary" class="sitemenu">
      <?php print $mainmenu; ?>
     </div>
   <!-- end primary -->
    <?php endif; ?>

    <?php if($page['search']): ?>
        <!--start search-->
    <div id="search" class="search">
           <?php print render($page['search']); ?>
        </div>
        <!--end search-->
      <?php endif; ?>
    <!--end of search-->

Tried adding the whole thing to a single definable div area with a set background in the css file. This worked for the background but for some reason added a phantom extra row after the menu? I also tried floating an absolute image to the area. Any portion of the image in the area became transparent. By now your probably thinking its something with the way I set it up, right? Well to test against that I changed the div id of navigation primary to secondary... and it worked perfectly as far as the background and width; however, then the block (the one with the images) disappeared. I have been at it for a couple days now and I am out of ideas.