I will be able to help you, I can't tell you much here for several reasons, I don't see the code, I don't know how good you are in coding, and can't see the exact problem.
One thing I could recommend to you tho is this, when you create a new page layout from the admin panel, always for "rendering", try to choose css div. I personally design heavy graphical sites due to the requests that I get, and this option of css div works beautifuly.
Like when I choose "table" for rendering, my whole page looks a bit messed up, but then when I switch to css div, it all gets fixed.
Also another thing you might want to do for the drop shadow, is to create a extra column on the part where the shadow should be, and have that shadow set as the background,
not sure if those will help, hope that they do tho.
