Theme development

Ok this may sound pretty newbieish but I'm having problems pushing the blocks in the right column of blue bluemarine theme over to the right. I have tried everything I can think of and got it to work the way I want in IE atleast 4 different ways but I can't figure out how to make it work in Firefox. I even referenced my Zen Garden book and still can figure it out.

Anyway when you look at the right menu on my page you'll see that blocks need to be centered or just moved over in that column so they don't overlap the strip in the background.

Just a quick warning my url is adult related so I will only put my site name and no link. There are no popups (not that there will ever be) or even advertisements ( there will be some of those ) because it's still in developement. Any help figuring this out would be greatly appreciated.

Site name: sexstoriesexchange.com/stories/
Here is my complete CSS file: ( I made a bit of a mess of it trying different things..sorry )

/* $Id: style.css,v 1.13.2.2 2007/01/04 21:19:48 killes Exp $ */

/*
** HTML elements
*/
body {
margin: 0;
padding: 0;
color: #4b180f;
background-color: #430505;

font: 95% Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif, georgia;
}

#footer {
background-color: #430505;
background:
font-size: 0.8em;
color: #dbccbe;
border: 0px 1px 1px 1px;
}

#sidebar-left h2{

On a theme i am developing there is a row whose hieght needs to be different on each page. Is there to allow a user to set a variables value while creating a new page that can be passed to page.tpl.php?

I was trying something like this. Quite unsuccessfully of course.

I put this at the top of page.tpl.php
$colheight = 500;

After that last line the content was printed out
print $content;

And this was near the bottom of page.tpl.php

How does Garland create that top menu? Where in the theme folder is that written? I would like to know so that I can create my own custom menu.

I'm using the privatemsg module and would like to change the layout. How can I change/override the current layout of the module?

I would like to modify the theme to convert the blue bar at the top center (above the name) to become an area. My goal is to put the login form and basic links on that bar.

The second mofification is the first page story module. I would like to include tags on the story preview. Currently the only things shown are Comments and Read More.

Any ideas would be appreciated.

I have updated my site to 5.0 and I am absolutely thrilled to bits with the new themes. However, it does look a bit bare... is it possible to use this theme, but with your own banner instead of the solid color bar at the top? Does that involve a lot of modifying or can it be done easily?

Hope this question hasn't been asked yet, I searched but could not find anything.

Thanks!