Yes, It's looking better now (but I had to navigate all over it and press refresh several times before the background came up)

Re IE - the problem is sometimes that IE is just too tolerant of non-compliant code. In this case it ignored the invalid stuff at the beginning of the CSS file and used what it could find; Firefox seemingly decided the file wasn't valid CSS because of the garbage at the beginning and ignored it. Both approaches have some merits, of course, but the difference shows why you should test your code on several browsers.

Re end tags: whereas most browsers can tolerate missing end tags all over the place as far as HTML parsing is concerned, they much more likely to foul up CSS, so since using CSS I've been much more rigorous about end tags. (I once worked for a company whose main product is a web browser, so I'm particularly sympathetic to the compatibility nightmares their designers face.)

Nice site, anyway. Good luck with the gigs!

Anahata