thanks a lot! Eliminating line-height helped a lot, aesthetically at least. It still didn't fix the non-existent word wrap, but instead of wasting more hours looking over CSS, I just decided to take the easy way out and insert all my text into 1x1 tables of predefined width (638 px, to be exact). I know it's kind of primitive, but it works!
once again, thanks for the advice!
