No problem. Like svferris said...this is what I do. You shouldn't have much of a problem with the browser versions. Anyone that downloads IE from the MS site will get 5.5 or 6.0beta, and 5.0 has been out for so long that most of your audience will have it.

The mouseover stuff is a bit tricky. It looks like you took it out of the page (which looks great by the way). Just a personal preference here, but I wouldn't do what you are talking about anyway. Changing the whole background is pretty disruptive. I would just leave it like you have it with the underline effect changing on mouseover...that is elegant and fits the page well.

To answer your question though, you are probably missing the CSS to change the background color of the DIV. What you were probably doing is trying to change the BGCOLOR of the table cell that the DIVs are in. Since the DIVs are on top, or actually in, the table cell, the BGCOLOR of the div is what you see. You would actually need a JS function to do what you want becuase you would have to tell the script which DIV you are on for that link.

As for websites...
http://www.devshed.com/ if pretty good.