Drop downs have empty area mucking up the menu

I built the site using site assist professional. The site's content pages work fine. The home page menu dropdown has a blank space (the size of a menu item) just below the menu bar which makes the drop down disappear when the cursor is moved off the bar toward a dropdown item.

This problem originated in IE6 and in trying to resolve it, I've moved the problem to IE7 as well.
It only happens in IE.

I've rebuilt the menu using css menu writer numerous times with no impact.
I've removed duplicated code and duplicated menus in the css and head section. No impact.
I've seen the height attribute on another post and applied it. No impact.
I've compared the home page css files to the content css files without finding any meaningful differences that would make one work and the other not work properly.

I'm stumped. Any ideas?
URL: www.accidentalfelons.com (where the problem is)
URL: about.php (to access the content menu that works fine. I add this because you won't be able to get past the home page from the index page otherwise.)

One clue may (or may not be) that I removed some of the dropdown selections and somehow removed something else. I used both cssmenu writer and manual edits of the menu files (menu.php) in doing this, so it could be I mucked something up. I've rebuilt the menus using css menu writer just to make sure. No impact.

Amendment: Another clue is the title "Accidental Felons". Its clipped off in IE at the bottom of the text and that white seam (looks like a horz rule line) isn't supposed to be there either. It isn't this way in DW or other browsers. Is something overlapping that's invisible otherwise and causing this problem?

Amendment 2: More troubleshooting to know what doesn't work. I created another test site using Site Assist Pro. Site works fine out of the box. Then I began to cut chunks of code out of this site's index page (I'll call "good site ") and paste them into my site's index page (I'll call "bad site "). For instance, I copied the entire head section from the good site into the bad site. No impact. I copied the entire code from the good site into the bad site (not any of the supporting files, such as style sheets, just the index.php code) and the problem disappeared. I copied the ul list from the good site into the bad site and deleted the reference to

<div id="topNavigation">
<?php virtual("CSSMenuWriter/cssmw_home/menu.php"); ?>
</div>

that using CSS Menu Writer added to replace it. No impact.

Then, I took the monitor and shook the s**t out of it. No impact.

All ideas are welcom at this point.


Thank you!