absolute positioning may be your problem, it stays put and will not move as data is being added.
Here's a site that has the wrapper resolution you mentioned, i never used them before so idk.
http://ryanfait.com/resources/footer-stick-to-bottom-of-page/
I was going bonkers over divs not ending up where I wanted them too. I too in the beginning started making everything absolute so i could place them where I wanted. This didn't work well. So I watched some utube tut vids and tried some things out myself and am getting a grip on the whole div thing.
Here are a few tips I took many painstaking hours to figure out:
1.If your divs are nested (inside another main div) make sure the total px of each div that is nested is equal to or less than the parent div. Include any padding or margin space. I ran into this issue a lot when i tried to insert multiple columns and the inserted column bounced down the page instead of next to the previous column.
2.If you want to stack 3+ divs side by side float all left, or right; exception is the last div you stack. So if you have 2 divs as columns and want a third float the first two left and the third either left or right. if you have 3 divs as columns and want a fourth column float the first 3 left and 4th one left or right.
I hope this helps ya.