i had a long hard think about the while IE thing, and i speant most of today (6hours) re-writting the template code to work with IE6 and above this meant a lot of hunting through joomla core files and template files as well as the page source, the only thing i havn't managed to get to work in IE 6 is the hover function on the main menu above the content, not sure why it doesnt work as the javascript is loaded and they work in firefox / IE 7, however it seems to be running much better and looking better after this as i also cleaned up a lot of the code