There were a couple instances where it used the <p> tag which makes two lines (like pressing enter twice) so I replaced those with just line breaks <br> instead. I also eliminated the center align command in the <p> tag since the table data tag already contains that information. My biggest problem, and thanks Ken for helping out as well, is that when I modified the table in the left column to add links to my auxiliary pages, I did something to break it. When I went to correct it later on I successfully 'fixed' it, though it pushed everything out of the way, so obviously there is still something not right with the code.
I will take a look at yours and see where I went wrong if I can figure it out at all. It might come down to modifying yours to add the things that I had changed.
BTW - I am using dreamweaver 8 and the <p> tag seems to act as a 1 line break such as the <br> tag does, but FF and IE8 both were interpreting it as two separate tags each with different functions.