This is one of those times when doing things “the right way” also happens to be the biggest pain in the ass…
I spent the last 2 hours messing around with a layout that I created a few weeks ago. I thought, “No problem, I’ll slice it up and throw the pieces in some DIVs and start on a new SharePoint layout.”
In the words of the immortal Vizzini … “You’d like to think that, wouldn’t you?!”
The problem I was having was that the left and right borders (background images) of the “main” div wouldn’t tile because I didn’t (couldn’t) set a height. So I looked ALL over the web, read up on every ‘clearfix‘ known to man, hundreds of X/HTML and CSS help boards, (and accidentally ran across this air tools site, not sure why it was in the search results!) and then FINALLY stumbled across this article on A List Apart. (and considering how long I spent looking for it, it’s titled appropriately! LOL!)
See? I *knew* it could be done, and remembered reading the article, but could not for the life of me remember where I saw it!! 
And so now that my pretty layout is behaving, all I need to do is spending the next 3 weeks beating SharePoint into submission. 
Mara
Oh honey…BTDT, with the same issue! Clearing floats is a b*tch and a half, especially when you consider IE6.