I managed to get the whole thing to work by removing all surrounding divs. Final result can be seen here: www.friendinc.org . It's not 100% right in IE6 but I think it's good enough. I am interested in learning more about how assigning and defining a class on a div would make any difference. For example, on the site above, the menu has a blue background the width of the design. I used a background image on the outer div to accomplish this but had originally placed a div with an id assigned and a background color that surrounded just the menu. And it would not work this way. Is there some restriction on wrapping a div around a CSS menu or does the method of assigning a class to div as describe in an earlier post solve the problem. Thanks for the input.
