>>Still, there have been lots of other examples where part of the message controls is not visible, nor is the recipient (without horizontal scrolling). Plus, you don't want to keep doing that sort of thing in future.
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>You would be surprise to see how many messages are adjusted to fit a proper formatting. Many people are simply ignoring, for example, to encapsulate the code in PRE tag. That looks really bad and very difficult to read. They do not realize when doing it that it limits the amount of potential replies or additional interest by more members to participate in the thread.
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>Rarely, however, do I have to adjust for long messages. This is about 1/20th ratio compare to those who are not taking the time to use the PRE tag.

I think Al's rather talking about .left of the right UserHead table and the table of the class Toolbar (the send-preview-cancel...) group, which should be always sized and positioned the same, regardless of the message width. Maybe design their CSS relative to the user's message width as defined in the settings, not the actual message width?