Thanks for the suggestion smiles but it sort of defeats the purpose of having a vertically gradiated background. I may as well use: and do away with the background picture all together. People may not notice the gradient on lower resolutions but it is very noticeable on the higher ones. The picture is just tall enough to cover the highest vertical resolution on most normal monitors.Anyway, it looks like setting the background to a fixed colour is what I'll have to do at this stage Its only a bit of eye candy; its more important that the site be readable without the css sheet. It just seemed odd to me that the repeat and the fixed background attribute commands are functioning from the css file just fine, with the background set in html, but the css setting of the background image command isn't. All I get is a blank white background when the command is un-commented.Zroid