Thanks. Here's more info on the problem in case someone else using Netscape is seeing the same issue.
Within .css file for the forum, the .tableborders background is defined as a dark brown color. And it is used in showflat.tmpl and showthreaded.tmpl by one of the main tables ("class=tableborders") to define the table borders.
However,, when scrolling down through the message in Netscape (the message must be longer than one page), the tableborder color replaces the normal color for the left-hand column (the area with your name, rank, picture, location, etc), hence turning it all dark brown except for the top section. MSIE doesn't have this problem.
The fix (for me) was to make the background color for .tableborders the same as the background color for .lighttable (within the .css file for the forum). Then I set the table's border=1 (in showflat.tmpl and showthreaded.tmpl) in order to define the table sections since the dark brown color of .tableborders was no longer defining them.
Setting the table background color to a static value would probably work just as well, but then that defeats the use of the .css file.
FC
