Styling text widget

Hey folks!

I have an image and some text showing in a text widget. At the moment it looks like crap (pardon my french) and whenever I try to use float or align on my image to get my text on the right-hand side, all of my widgets in my sidebar get messed-up for some reason.

Here is the code that is inserted for styling.

#sidebar .textwidget p { padding: 10px; font-size: 11px; clear: left; }

.textwidget { display: inline; float: left; margin: 0 10px 0 0; padding: 3px; background-color: #fff; }

Also, the background-color: #fff; is making some background in another widget change color.

What can cause this sort of problem? (Perhaps bad coding somewhere, but I don’t even know what code to look at.)

Thank you.
/danichi