Thanks for the reply. Several things. I do everything on the web host's servers, so I don't do anything on my local computer. I was hoping for an easy solution but it sounds like there isn't one.
As for the panes resizing themselves, it is obvoius what happens when there is nothing in the right pane. My problems are:
1) I have pages that are identical, but one will come out with the center pane (an therefore the entire page) wider.
2) At times, a given page will have one width (fits completely on the screen), and at other times, without any changes, display with a different width (right edge of center pane about at right edge of screen).
It all seems so unpredictable. I thought my fixed width skin (standard DNN) would prevent the pages from going off to the right.
Frustrated.