the statistics of my site show that only 2% are viewing my site at a resolution lower than 1024*768 and 3% are using IE < 5.5, so if a forum isn't displayed properly in those cases, so be it.
I had a discussion with someone and he said a forum couldn't be displayed without using tables... I'm always up for a challenge, but after 10 hours work I expected more. after removing the tables and replacing them with divs & spans; it worked perfect on IE but it looked horrific on mozilla & opera. In order to get it to work on opera I replaced the spans with divs which worked but it still looked like crap in mozilla. After adding a zillion clear:both divs I finally got it to work with all three browsers. but now that yet another browser can't display it correctly I'm just sick of the whole only-use-tables-for-tabular-data idea