fixed width website that are left aligned, 1) shows Eurocentric design 2) still looks bad on large screen compared to a centered page...

CSS has a minHeight and minWidth and maxHeight and MaxWidth properties but they are not well supported yet...

I have used JS to simulate these functions in some sites, where JS calculated based on document.body.clientHeight and document.body.clientWidth... This way I can have minimum and maximum sizes, within this range I can handle things 1 way and outside these paratmeters I can handle things a different way... i.e. very tight screens become fixed width and very wide screen become fixed width, within the range I may have fixed width components with the page overall being % sizes... % sizes are specially valid when you have say 3 columns, 1 fixed (i.e. menu) and two variable which should share 50/50 or 60/40 etc. the remaining space...

I agree that you should probably code for 800x600 not too many people are using 640x480 anymore, most new machines won't even support that size anymore...

Also, I always expect users might resize my pages... if you don't think so, think again...