Yes I have been fiddling again. I have finally settled on this because it renders the pages more cleanly. I have made some page titles more informative. This can happen only in an untabbed template.
Tuesday 30 October
There is one page in particular I have been using as a yardstick, and it works extremely well in this template. I hope this is the end of the past few days of experimentation.
Some problems in IE7 led to a final redesign.