Re: top_bar question
Yeah, it is possible to do that with CSS. However, you may need to play around with the .tpl files, as I think that the top bar is nested in a table cell.
The particular piece of CSS that you need to fix the location of the top bar would be:
position: fixed;
An example of this can be found on the W3C's website.
You will need to play about with the style sheet that you use and the html markup in .tpl files, but I can't see why it shouldn't be possible to get it to work.
Please note that this doesn't actually work in IE - IE doesn't support the CSS markup position: fixed.
ewan