Well done skin! The ovals are a pretty nifty trick. At first I couldn't figure out why one started at the top in IE but only the text got pushed down.

Have you tinkered with

.bSideItemContainer {
padding : 0px;
margin-left : 10px;
width : 190px;
}

Since all of your images are aligning properly I figured the issue wasn't in anything calling an image, so I sort of thought about the next obvious place pixels were in demand.

(BTW xampp is stupid. Okay maybe it's not stupid, but it's stupider than me because I can't make it do anything but the demos it claims proves it works.)

Unfortunately I've tried all kinds of things and can't seem to figure the problem out. I'm hoping someone magically has the answer here, but it's understandable if no solution arises. I just didn't have anywhere else to ask the quick question.

Have you tried taking a sledgehammer to it? Knock EVERYTHING that is actual content out of the sidebar components, leaving only a couple of empty ovals. Actually one will do for this test. If a single oval can form without dropping down then your issue and solution lie in the text. Slowly add one bit of content at a time until you see what causes the drop. Might be multiple things, but that's just a few test cases.

What I mean is you currently have a sidebarcontainer with an h4 and an h3 and a ul and some lis dropping down. I suspect it'll be the h4 if it's not the sidebarcontainer, but it's not a hard test to perform.

If an empty sidebar oval drops down before completing then your issue is probably caused by the other side: the bPosts and bPostsWide things. They call for pixel widths (and if memory serves me) more importantly padding in pixels. Reckon you played there already - just throwing ideas out that might get you where you want to be.

I think I have it working. I found a solution here: http://mboffin.com/post.aspx?id=1824.

Basically, I added the following line to my .bSideItem class:

margin-left: 3px !important; 
margin-left: 0px;

The first margin-left is taken up by Firefox (standards compliant browsers) because of the !important tag. IE doesn't pay attention to !important so it takes the second margin-left which avoids dropping the sidebar.

3px was all I needed.
Anyway, hope this holds up after some testing (and when ie7 comes out). But thanks for the help.

Congratulations!

A little research can do what a sledgehammer can eventually pound out, only a lot less work involved.

Good to hear it's working.