Positioning Searchbox and IE CSS bug

Thorough searching for an answer to my little IE bug, and this is the closest I can come. podz’ tutorials are very informative too, but still I can’t iron out my particular wrinkle. And I’ve waited four days for someone to see this and respond to it, but since it’s not a new post, and it sits way at the bottom of a thread, then I guess it’s not going to get any response unless I make it its own new post.

(Oh, and now that I’ve been researching it, I’ve decided I’d like another small feature to work also). Here goes:

In Firefox, I like the header navbar for my Gemini theme in WP1.5.2. It’s just high enough to contain the text of the navigation links. Have a look.

But in IE, it has space underneath it.

I’ve tried all sorts of hacks. In the stylesheet, and in the header template, etc. I’m just not getting rid of that pesky space below the navbar.

And as for the second part to this query, I’d like to put the searchbox on that very same line. As you can see, it looks okay in the sidebar for now, but I’d like to see if I could position the navbar a little more over to the left, and the searchbox all the way over to the right, all on one line which is only as tall as the text’s line-height.

Can someone help please?