FF & IE CSS problems

so been playing around with CSS and since just getting started with it all have been using tables. gotta start some where then start migrating off of it.

well anyways to my question. what is so different about FF and IE when it comes to reading CSS? The site i been playing with looks fine in FF but when loading it in IE, lets just say its crap. i guess another question is, is it the CSS or the tables?

this is the site i been playing with. http://www.kingdomsend.com/failtest/test.html

i am a css noob, i know it

First off, all of those rows at the top that are colspan=4, why not put them all in one row. Doubt that's a cause of your issues, it would just take less code.

I'm guessing that you don't need both div and # in the styles. Though I think your main problem is that your footer is 3 columns wide instead of 4.

Is content-spacer.jpg a gradient line or something? If not why not add some padding on the next column and drop the need for that column completely?

The page took a terrible long time to load in both FF and IE and neither was fully successful in loading your banner.

cool, the last time I saw this is 5 years ago :D

stop using tables for design!
try a free css template from the net and start learning CSS and table less design

I think you can start with this
http://www.freecsstemplates.org/preview/advertising

check the css and the images to learn how it works

well finished the one book, started on another and looked at the code of about 5 other sites and pulled them apart and came out with this

http://www.kingdomsend.com/cctest9/index.html

i need to work on the fonts, the color and size just seems off.
this is what I hope to have it look like at the end (excluding font type/size). http://www.kingdomsend.com/cctest9/images/complete.jpg

EDIT- i did figure out the image thing for the sentry gun
(there is another thing i kinda took out of the site. behind the right content there is to be a sentry gun but i didn't know how to put that in there and not have the sentry gun repeat but the rest of the background repeat. I guess the sentry gun would be like a static water mark, but not 100% sure on that yet, haven't looked that up yet....)