Help wanted with CSS?

Hello,

I'm creating a site which is still in it's very early stages and have encountered two annoying problems that I just can't seem to fix no matter how hard I look (maybe too hard?).
The first is with the background repeat inside a div, The white stripe across the bottom is the background of the white block above it and shouldn't be there.
My second frustration is with how the site loads in the Opera browser, in a window too small to accommodate the page it displays as it should, but in a full size window the whole content drops much lower than it should be. I've tried adding an opera only margin-top adjustment to the css and it just won't budge!
Any help would be greatly appreciated!!

Thanks & Regards,
Cole
web design company