Theme development

I am still learning CSS.
While I have learned to do most things. I would like to know how to make a background image of the body of my site span and repeat the height of my page.

For example:
http://www.branzone.com/

Having the background body of the site span from top of the browser to the bottom.
I can do it so that it will create the background where there is content, but by default I want it to span it automaticly.

IE is being a pain in the patoot and I'm wondering if someone could take a look at my site and give me some hints...

Details:

I'm working from a copy of Bluemarine, and changing the style.css incrementally to tweak things - I generally only need a few basic changes.

I have implemented graphical tabs as discussed here:

http://drupal.org/node/42459 (make sure you go down to the bottom of that discussion as my initial solution there had to be modified)

i would like to have the 'phplayersmenu' (www.phplayersmenu.sourceforge.net)
based navigation for my Drupal 4.6 website,

can you help me how to integrate the phplayersmenu
into the phptemplate theme?

thaks a lot.

enky.

As I'm rolling out improvements and updates to the Smarty Theme Engine I'm wanting to convert some additional themes to increase its usage.

The current list is short, so

What theme(s) would you like converted to Smarty?

I'm trying to springboard off of FriendsElectric for a site and am having some problems with it right off the bat on two items so far:

First There is an issue in Safari where certain portions of the mid section overlap the far right side:
http://www.hiptobefit.com/images_errors/Safari-1.jpg

I'm having problems (as most of the people using the spreadfirefox theme). I'd like to change the size of the block on the right sidebar. You can see what i'm talking about here. Does anyone have a clue on how to fix it?