Theme development

I've got a real problem with the theme'd table output of Drupal.
None of the tables generated by modules (including core modules) have a unique ID or some sort of class associated with them!

This means I cannot apply any CSS dressing to the tables without doing it generically to all

My main requirement is to make tables width: 100%, because the cells always appear squashed up on Drupal pages.

I am trying to edit my $head variable and can not figure out where to do that. I'm using PHPTemplate.

Sorry for title this isnt a flame but a serious question, Ive only used drupal for a week but one of its major drawbacks are themes, or lack of them, and also the not very user-freindly theme customization guide. In the past few months ive used joomla, mamboo, wordpress and nucleus and its hard to compare. Wp and mam/joom have well over 500 themes and nucleus has a great theme competition going on right now. Its not only the amount,these guys plus several other platforms have very well written theme guides and support, some even have css editor extensions.

I was wondering how/where to edit to place various contents on the center column of the page?

Like the onion.com? with one main story on top and then split the the cell below into two column..and etc?
does anyone got a sample code to show me how it works with phptemplate? tks very much

I am using the xtemplate engine for my themes.

in the system table of the drupal database, I have one entry for type = 'theme_engine'

It lists its filename as 'themes/engines/xtemplate/xtemplate.engine'

in the same table, system, entries with the type = 'theme', should have their descriptions match the filename of the engine.

With one exception, you guessed it: bluemarine, all of my themes have the discription of 'themes/engines/xtemplate/xtemplate', missing the '.engine' on the end.

So I want to make the menu and them like the old site (url with held)... I have the most of it set but now I need to address the

<li class="leaf"> & <li class="collapsed">The default is, well, not my style :-)

Here's what I have so far.

What I'm thinking about is doing some what of a reversal... Dark then light hover.

Help a noob please!