I finally looked at a couple of Anil's pages in Firefox and Opera...what a BIG difference!
For those who have never seen it in IE, the sidebar is mainly under the "HCoop Portal" text as compared to the logo for FF/O...thus there is a vast white space on the left...almost as wide as the sidebar...that explains my Wiki/prior comments...and as IE is my primary browser, even though it has "issues", I gave my feedback based on it.

-- anil@hcoop.net (Anil K. Narayanan) wrote:
"j.c.hallgren@juno.com" writes:
> http://hcoop.net/~anil/test/portal.html is also very readable, but in it, the
> vertical spacing of links/items in sidebar is too great compared with the
> non-boxed one.
That one was not supposed to be there. The bad spacing is from trying to fix 
the spacing difference on IE and Firefox. I'll put the right file in tomorrow