I'm still fighting my way to understand CSS – so if there's a better way to do this, feel free to let me know.
I wanted a black center column, that I would put content boxes with a white background over it. So I created my background with the centered black column, used CSS to center it and repeat the background vertically. Then I created my content box, centered that using "margin: 0 auto;". As per usual, looks great in Firefox, but IE has the box shifted over to the left by 1px.
Poked around online. First I found this article which was talking about a different kind of shifting. They wanted you to add "html { min-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 1px; }" to your styles so that the page doesn't shift suddenly when scrollbars appear on one page and not the other. (what they have you add forces scrollbars to show on every page)
Then I found this article which explains what's happening. Because I'm centering the background via one method, and the content via another – this is the reason why it's different. They suggest using a wrapper div to center the background – thus centering everything via the same method. The only problem with this is that I wanted that black column to extend the full height of the browser window. (below the content). Just doing "height: 100%" didn't seem to work.
So I happened to have still put the code in for the scrollbar thing, and just for kicks added a 1px margin to the left side… and strangely it works. (At least on IE and Firefox on the PC. I don't have access to a mac anymore, so no idea what happens there).
I'm happy I got it to work.. but I'm not sure why it does.