OK, slapped meself upside the head because, although I haven't had the case open, of course I've installed new hardware recently - the new keyboard and mouse. Thought I had it beat when I updated the drivers for those, but alas no... but I may well be on the right track, since that's the big thing that changed right before the problem started happening. Time to sleep now.

Still fighting this one. Thought it might be a USB conflict, so used an adaptor to plug the mouse into a PS/2 port instead. Thought that had fixed it for a minute, but nope.

Used a tool call 'Silent Runners' to check out what was running in the background and found 'powerreg scheduler', a piece of spyware that neither Adaware nor Spybot had found, so got rid of that... still no dice.

Someone suggested it could be the nVidia IDE drivers for my motherboard (which has the nForce 3 250 chipset), so that's the next attempt.

...aaannddd, that seems to have cured it! No real connection with the new hardware, that I can see anyway, but it worked.

Computar machines == teh v00d00, I tells ya.

So, you finally gave in and sacrificed a chicken?

I though chickens only worked up to about the network conflict level. Don't driver issues require the blood of a virgin or something?

It's been too long since my last MIS/IT class!

quote:

Originally posted by heavyboots:
I though chickens only worked up to about the network conflict level. Don't driver issues require the blood of a virgin or something?

Virgin's Blood? In the this day and age?

You'll be lucky...

You have to use the blood of Virgin Chickens, a rare thing to find here in the Dirty South....

Not so basic, maybe, but I'm trying not to proliferate threads...

Check out this page: http://www.cser.ualberta.ca/wordpress/

Now click on the 'Publications' category link in the sidebar on the left. All the fonts in the sidebar will get smaller (in many browsers including Safari and Firefox).

I have no clue why, having perused the css style sheet, the source of this page, and the php source that generates it.

My guess is that something isn't closing properly in the actual post in the Publications category, because the sidebar text is immediately below that in the page source, but I can't spot what it might be. The css validates as correct, and the html almost does, except for the use of 'color' and 'background-color' in the 'hr' tag (which works but is a kludge).

What is the connection between the length of the text on the right and the side bar?

I have no clue either but it looks like the sidebar shrinks because it tries to accommodate the text-length.

Oooh, could be - thanks, good clue...

{tootles off to keep looking}

D'oh! Nah, the actual width of the sidebar doesn't change, just the fonts

He could be right there... I was looking at source and can't see anything different, but I'm at home so I don't have any tools to compare the files. But it could be as simple as the fact that one page is shorter than the other so the div for the sidebar has shrunk to match the length of the text on the main page, so you wouldn't spot it by looking at the source.

quote:

Originally posted by Bravus:
D'oh! Nah, the actual width of the sidebar doesn't change, just the fonts

The width doesn't change but the length might. Try padding the main text on the page with some Lorem Ipsum and see if that fixes it.

Otherwise my wife says your CSS is f*cked.

Hmm, the little bit of 'meta' text at the bottom of each post (Posted in xx | No Comments) is meant to be in a smaller font, but in the other categories it's not. In Publications it is, and I think it's the carry-over of that small font that's breaking the sidebar. So if I can track down what's happening with the "postmetadata" tag in the css I'll be on my way...

The style sheet is here, by the way, in case that's useful:

http://www.cser.ualberta.ca/wordpress/wp-content/themes...sengCoffee/style.css

My wife wants to know if the image menu dynamically generated? I don't know what she means, I don't see a menu that is an image.

Never mind, she's foud the source for that too

Yeah, I'm not sure what she means either. The only image in the page is the header graphic.

Currently printing out the page source to go through line by line and make sure every tag that opens closes...

Ok, I think this makes sense:

quote:

i copied the css into dreamweaver
and then i copied the two pages
and then i pressed 'clean up html'
on the publications page it cleaned up 4 meta tags
and on the students on it cleaned up 7
now they're both the same size

I think that helps. Looks like there are 3 less tags on the publications page. I think my wife is obsessing over finding the problem now.

quote:

Originally posted by Bravus:
Currently printing out the page source to go through line by line and make sure every tag that opens closes...

Line them up and hold them up to the window (assuming it's light out). That's the old fashioned method for file comparison.

OK, all fixed. Seems it was a malformed actual post, using {dir} tags and *way* too many font definitions, maybe not all closed. I'd tried everything with the site, then started messing with the actual posts, and that fixed it.

Thanks for the help, hasad, Kradlum and Mrs K.

Edit: Turned out it was the 'Publications' page that was behaving correctly, and the other two were both borked, in different ways, by malformed code in posts. That's what threw me off the track, looking for the problem in the wrong places. And yeah, it's a worry that the software is that vulnerable to bad stuff in posts... But trying to fix this one meant I made a number of other improvements to the code, so that's all good.

This message has been edited. Last edited by: Bravus,