After looking at the skin for the last month, I found that the content area looked to framed by the colored borders.
When the content was too large for the content area, it was hidden by the footer - this looked more like an error than designed on purpose.
So moved the content from the footer to the header, and removed the footer.
Then I had a long argument with IE about font sizes... FireFox and Safari on both my Windows and iMac (yes I have an apple mac with a nice 24" screen) was showing all my changes, where IE ignored me. Finally I managed to get all the font sizes to look, almost but not entirely unlike each other.
I am so happy that it is not my design skills that pay the bills.