well,I left work today frustrated that I couldnt get it fixed, but I uploaded some new versions to the website and went home.
Got home, loaded it up, and it was fine...
same browser at home and work, chrome. potentially the site was being cached somehow and even though all the active components were changing as I worked on it, the page size was cached and unaffected... I thought it might be browser specific at the time and I tried the site with IE, but it had the same problem because I hadn't uploaded new code. Since visual studio always launched the default browser it never 'cleared its cache' I guess.
So yeah, I wasted like 3 hours today....
Thanks Hang