Censorship & Choice
I note that you censored my last demolition job on fixed width page designs. Perhaps I hit a raw nerve with that one.
Firstly I am a web designer myself and in my experience fixed width page designs are rarely needed and are often simply the last resort of an incompetent designer who can't cope with idea of a flexible page width. There may be a few specific cases where a fixed design might be justifiable, eg a page with a very small amount of content which would be unlikely to fill even a very small screen, but I can't think of any reason to use a fixed width for a general site design.
Furthermore, you state that you used a fixed width in order to give yourselves more control over the page, however, by definition, by giving yourselves more control you have to take it away from somebody else, ie us the poor users who now have to adapt our browsing preferences to fit in with what you think is good, when a flexible width design would have enabled everybody to make there own choices.
To all of those who think the fixed width is good because it fits in with you style of working, that's great, but for the rest of us we have lost the ability to choose. I ask you, is it so difficult to just resize your browser window if the page isn't a comfortable size for you ? I think I might start a campaign to have The Register fix it's width at 1580px, which fits nicely with what I want, but probably doesn't suit anybody else.
In the meantime, my greasemonkey extension for Firefox (available on the userscripts website) is fixing the problem, although it has forced a change in browsing habits, since I prefer Konqueror to Firefox, I now have to start up a separate browser to use the reg, so my visits are likely to become less frequent since this requires extra effort. I may even drift off entirely, as a long term reader (8+ years) that would be a pity.