Thanks guys for giving me something to mull over. After about an hour after reading Sands thought it suddenly hit me that the Navigation at the bottom of the left hand column will not be changing thus applying a height attribute to that (#left_pan ul ID in the CSS file) will force the bottom down to a desired point. In addition that will also resolve any problems encountered for the pages that will not make use of the rightLeft & rightRight columns in the main part of the screen

Thanks again for putting my mind back onto the right track