However, your changes still suffer from a few issues, the main one being what I was originally trying to solve, which is to prevent the topband from being cut off to the width of the viewport when you need to shrink the viewport and scroll the page to the side.
So it does. That issue wasn't occurring on another site that I had worked on, so I only noticed it once you mentioned it.
I noticed that your style definitions also broke the page's bottom edge, but I haven't looked closely enough to find out why yet.
As you've noticed, I replaced the content area background with CSS defined styling only. I didn't recognize the gradient in the background, although a vertical gradient PNG could be stretched along the y-axis of the content area to achieve the look, as well.
Oh, the changes to the nav sections break horribly in IE6. Unfortunately that browser is a high priority given the target audience for this company's services.
Since this was a quicky, I didn't check it in IE (which requires me to start up my Windows emulator...what a pain!). But I'm always having to check and tweak for IE when I do these types of jobs, and it's a headache.