Thank you for your response! I think I was getting close to pulling my hair out. I corrected many of my errors by using an online free css validator
http://jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator/that reads and reports on the css applied to whatever url you enter. With regard to the black border at the top, I went thru my css one line at a time and found one line that was not needed in FF but messed up IE. By deleting it, voila! problem solved.
I also thank you for the additional resources! I think it would be useful if their was a forum where members could share the resources they find on the web. Bob