I think I figured out the problem.
My computer's running on 800 x 600 resolution. I changed it temporarily, and everything fit. Now, if this weren't a family computer, I'd change it - it looks better anyway. But let's just say my brother (Half - do you know him?) and my parents wouldn't be to fond of the smaller icons on the desktop.

So yeah, my resolution causes me to see one screw up of a home page. Oh well.

Can you change the resolution solely on your web browser?

@MAGNUS; i believe individual users can set permissions within the gallery as to who can view what when browsing through users albums. if desired, the entire album can be protected so that only forum-authenticated users can view it, or just individual pieces/sub-albums.
this software gives the admin (and registered user) a lot of control over the content within the gallery. currently, i believe the gallery is still unvisible to unauthenticated users (but i'll have to check that).

@WW; no, i don't believe you can. you need to change the entire desktop resolution, then the browser inherits what's there when you make it full screen. the browser can, in effect, go as large as you like, but on an 800x600 res, only 800 pixels of the browser will be viewable at any one time lol

@Sakebassz; yes. shortly i'll be building a copy of this forum elsewhere to develop the new skin on, and that'll be part of it. and thank you for the clicks

it's a standard stylesheet controlling the location of all the divs, derived from the center of the screen outwards. in IE i had to hack it so that min-height would work, so that the seagulls all appeared at the bottom etc, and of course, the styles in IE & FF are different, so i took advantage of the _ trick, in that IE will read CSS that starts with an _, i.e _height, _padding, etc. while FF doesn't, so takes the first lot of parameters. hence the fairly easy cross-browser compatibility.
http://cuccoscratch.com/wp-content/include/cs/styles.css if you're curious. if you resize the browser from maximized state, it should be fine so long as you don't resize beyond 1024 pixels width-ways, then things *will* start to go skee-wiff. not really helpable though due to the size of the purple box to begin with is >800px i think, so it's pointless trying to fix it for those resolutions, as the rest of the site will be out of line anyway!
glad opera's working fine too. i'll add that to my list

I bet he can't cook me dinner while balancing a bucket of water on his head and code the website while ordering me a pizza. But that's ok, we love him anyway.

Nifty.