Lemme address a few of the things you commented on, if I may ;)
Miaghstir: try having it scale with the window width
One reason I'm, personally, not too fond of layouts with variable width is the thing with widescreen and 4:3 monitors. If you, say, make the layout scale well for one, it's gonna look to thin/wide in the other. Unless you want to play with js hacks and what have you. Who knows, I might do so yet, but at this second I'm still a bit pre-occupied and the time I get to work on this is a wee-bit scarce :|
Miaghstir: (possibly using max- and min-width, to make it not take ridiculous shapes),
If I remember correctly (and I'm mostly positive that I do), the problem with those (in particular, with min-width, since this is what I use the most often) is that IE does not understand that shit. Which, incidentally, is one of the billions of reasons I hate IE with the passion of a thousand burning suns.
Friends don't let friends use IE.
Miaghstir: also what's with the 10-pixel gap near the top?
That, my friend, would be a glitch. Possibly caused by me having to adapt the pure-html structure from something else when it turned out that wordpress has a weird, weird way of doing things sometimes.