>1) Hardcoded pt sizes in the CSS that make it too hard to read for us presbyopics using high resolution monitors. It ought to respect my current browser text size settings.

I hate when people use pt. period. At least FireFox scales these also when you zoom with Ctrl-Plus and Ctrl-Minus. But MSIE doesn't, and it's really unclear what proper behavior is.

Sorry, but I don't have an answer in general...