Question

I’ve been picking through the various width elements, and haven’t struck gold yet

What is making the left hand column totally break?

http://southasianlitfest.com/3-columns/

Answer 1

Easiest way to get such errors is to omit some “ending”.
According to validator:
http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fsouthasianlitfest.com%2F3-columns%2F&charset=%28detect+automatically%29&doctype=Inline&group=0

You have 50 errors. Looks like you forget end of span in some kind of a repeater:

Line 246, Column 318: unclosed end-tag:ith Mohsin Hamid</span</h3></div>

And to close some other tags. Like

Line 390, Column 38: start tag was here
        <div class="dsc_tweet tweets"><H2><img src="http://southasianlitfest.com/

Also there is an error with “width as attribute”

Try to fix it and see.

The old browsers handle their errors each its own way. So some browsers could eat this unclosed tags correctly. Others, like IE7 – not.