nigelt74 - 6:28 am on Nov 20, 2009 (gmt 0)

Thanks for that, setting different background Colours made all the difference to figuring out things.

In case anyone else has a similar problem (surely I am not the only thickie out there)I replaced the left and right footer spans with divs

that has the following CSS applied to it

div.left {
float:left;
width:500px;
}
div.right {
float:right;
width:400px;
}

and it works in IE6 and FF, can't test in anything else yet, but it looks promising