Sorry but I'm not 100% sure what you mean, however I have just reworked things and my dev site is now showing white boxes with grey lines and rounded corners around each product in the featured products list.
(See attached)
Having re-read the original coding in this thread and implemented it with a few minor modifications I've managed to get this to work.
Apart from changing the CSS to suit my needs the main change I made was in the location of the coding in the tpl shown in the first post because my tpl is completely different to that shown.
If this is what your looking to replicate let me know and I'll show you the steps I went through otherwise have another go and describing what you meant in your last post and I'll see what I can do
Also the error I spoke about in my last post was due to me playing around with the wrong files so ignore that bit.