so I guess I solved this. If anyone has ie and wouldnt mind testing it out and letting me know that would be much appreciated. My ie, running on a mac, doesn't work too great (or hardly at all).
Anyway, all I ended up doing is insert a table. The pages of the site have three pretty distinct sections, so I put in a table with three rows, and one column and set the width to 100%. And for some reason that worked. I have no idea why.
The only thing wrong now is my mouseover image enlargements don't work in ie. But I am not convinced that its not just my version acting up. I hope so. Agh!