Need a better min-width & min-height fix for IE

I have been struggling with this for a couple of days now, and can find a catch all solution to the problem.  When you use either min-height or min-width in a style sheet to set the minimum height of minimum width of an element, it looks fine in moz browsers, but in IEPC and in Safari it breaks.  I have found that if you can simulate it by setting the width or height of a block level element inside the parent element.  This works fine if the last block level element is the same for each instance of the parent-child element being displayed.  Example of my min-height usage:

#contentarea {
    float: left;
    width: 520px; 
    margin: 0;
    padding: 0 0 18px 18px;
    border-left: 2px dotted #fff;
    text-align: justify;
    font-size: .9em;
    min-height: 500px; /* sets the minimum height of the conetent area box */
}

#contentarea p {
    height: 500px; /* workaround for IEPC lack of support for min-height */
}

The above example works fine ONLY if your LAST block level element inside of the <div id="contentarea"> is a <p>.  But if your main content area is dynamically generated, there is no guaranty that the last block level element inside of the content area is a <p>.  I would hate to have to create a rule for each element that would be the last displayed in my dynamically generated content area.  Also, and this is a big also, there can only be one instance of the block level element inside of your content box.  For example, if I had two instances of the <p> element, the height of each <p> element would be set to 500px.  This will create a lot of unnecessary space between the 2 <p> tags.  Sometimes <p> is not the last element.  On some pages I have just a form, and when this occurs the page breaks in IE. 

Does anyone know of a global fix for IE other than the one I described above?

I hope this was not to confusing.

Thanks.