Theme development

I'm nearly at wit's end here. Using PHPTemplate and a custom theme, I want to set up a block region at the top of the main window, just before the main content. I'm trying to make the left block wider than the right. Right now, I have two view blocks in the area, which is called "content-top". The CSS looks like something like this:

I Want to buy theme for Calling Card business. Please contact me offline.

dome@tel.co.th

I am still learning CSS.
While I have learned to do most things. I would like to know how to make a background image of the body of my site span and repeat the height of my page.

For example:
http://www.branzone.com/

Having the background body of the site span from top of the browser to the bottom.
I can do it so that it will create the background where there is content, but by default I want it to span it automaticly.

IE is being a pain in the patoot and I'm wondering if someone could take a look at my site and give me some hints...

Details:

I'm working from a copy of Bluemarine, and changing the style.css incrementally to tweak things - I generally only need a few basic changes.

I have implemented graphical tabs as discussed here:

http://drupal.org/node/42459 (make sure you go down to the bottom of that discussion as my initial solution there had to be modified)

i would like to have the 'phplayersmenu' (www.phplayersmenu.sourceforge.net)
based navigation for my Drupal 4.6 website,

can you help me how to integrate the phplayersmenu
into the phptemplate theme?

thaks a lot.

enky.

As I'm rolling out improvements and updates to the Smarty Theme Engine I'm wanting to convert some additional themes to increase its usage.

The current list is short, so

What theme(s) would you like converted to Smarty?