standard navigation box using CSS

[otf]

Hi *,

I am trying to code a basic, standard navigation box using CSS (this is as
much as I can do so far ;-))

By "standard" I mean a "select options" form object and its entry text box
with an image button and a number of categorized browsable links.

After testing the page OK with a number of different browsers, I noticed IE
for some reason does not cover the whole area as declared in an external
<div /> declaration, as I think, it should all the way to the right, but
then it jerkily does when you place the mouse over the area, which is
something I don't want to happen.

Here is the page whose CSS and HTML validated fine

http://www.geocities.com/tekmonk2005/HTML/nav_example.html

Here is how it looks when you use IE (just refresh if you need to reproduce
it)

http://www.geocities.com/tekmonk2005/HTML/nav_example_00.jpg

and here is how it looks after you place the mouse over it

http://www.geocities.com/tekmonk2005/HTML/nav_example_02.jpg

Also I noticed with other browsers just placing the mouse over the line
highlights the text belonging to the line even if it is far to the left,
but IE only does so if you hover your mouse exactly on the text, which
makes users life/work unnecessarily harder.

How do you fix this jerky effect? Why is it happening?

Thanks
otf