Thank you for the help. By you mentioning the td.container it made me think and that's where I ended up adding code to put my side borders. Perfect when it comes to solid lines etc...but images still won't work no matter what I do. I'm thinking I'll have to edit the templates to do this instead of doing it in the css. (web searches I'm finding are saying most browsers do not support border images...hmmm) But...what template would I edit to change all the pages? Haven't figured that one out yet. Tho I do have a ticket in with xcart about how to do so.
To get my border to the top and bottom of the page I ended up having to specify margins for top and bottom (they weren't specified before) in the html body. Background images I knew how to do (thank you tho) it's just the border images...grrr.
But at least thanks to you help I now have borders that are where they're supposed to be and don't mess up and move all over the page.
So again...thanks for helping out
It's much appreciated.