Spry Menu Bar (horizontal) - Problems with uneveness (height variance) between adjacent items

Question

Hello:
Like many I will confess that I am new to the spry experience and attempting to catch up.  I am trying to design a horizontal menu bar that employs a background image (repeating GIF gradient bar repeated along the the x-access) to create a beveled/rounded edge effect.  I have another with a different hue that is used on focus and mouse over, etc.  While this works well with the drop downs, there appears to be a "boxiness" between adjacent top level menu items and they appear to have slightly different height.  This seems to be determined by the text forms the content of any link or menu item.  In effect it creates other differences in appearance as the outer most (top and bottom edges) of the GIF appear to be cut off from one menu item to the next.  This leaves a very undesirable look to the page as it juts up and then falls back as it the top level item moves across the web page.
The other point I should make is that this problem, although it exists in all browsers to some extent, is most pronounced in IE6 and below.  Unfortunately many of the anticipated visitors to this site are forced by their IT department to use IE6.
My question is:  can you set a variable that overrides or determines the height of the background of the menu items?  Alternatively is there some other way of addressing the problem so that I can get a uniform look as the menu items transition to each other.
Thanks in advance for any help that can be offered.
Steve.

Answer 1

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