Trouble getting rid of default link colors!

Question

Dear Folks,
I have created a ul list for navbar: reads just great in Safari, but has residual blue link color and underline - I have eliminated all styles in the source code, and have written styles in the CSS. Firefox reads all the visted and current links as default underlines, where I want color boxes.
The header where the navbar is located is a secondary header with the div #header2 (no nav bar on the splash index page)
What I wanted was a "tabbed" look, (dark background with light rollovers) which I got as long as I don't "visit" pages - then it reverts to blue letters with underline.
Any help? Here is the code in the CSS
In frustration, I set a separate link color for the footer for all pages - it read fine when each was a separate command, but combining it in CSS Shorthand made it not function.
#footer a:link a:visited a:hover a:active {
color: #CCC98F;
text-decoration: none;
and here is the code for the navbar in the secondary header:
#header2 #navbar ul {
font-family: "Gill Sans", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif;
font-size: 0.8em;
font-style: normal;
font-weight: normal;
color: #CC9;
list-style: none;
#navbar li {
float: left;
list-style: none;
padding: 0px 10px 15px 0px;
margin: 0;
#navbar li a:link, #header li a:visited {
background: #2B2D16;
padding: 0.2em 0.5em;
font-family: "Gill Sans", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif;
font-size: 1em;
line-height: 1em;
font-weight: normal;
color: #CC9;
text-decoration: none;
margin-right: 0.5em;
width: auto;
text-align: center;
white-space: nowrap;
word-spacing: 0.2em;
letter-spacing: 0.1em;
#navbar li a:hover {
color: #D2A44E;
background: #625214;
#navbar li a.current, #header li a.current:hover, #header li a.current:active {
    color: #D2A44E;
background: #625214;
cursor: default;
Martha

Answer 1

In your CSS, you always need to define a minimum of 4 rules for the "states" of each link.
Minimum states are:
link
visited
hover
active
in that order.
In your CSS, for #navbar li a (which is any link inside a list inside an element with id="navbar"), you have only defined the link and hover states.
In the absence of a specific CSS rule for the visited state, the browser will always default to blue underline.
Change your CSS as follows
#navbar li a:link, #navbar li a:visited, #header li a:visited {
background: #2B2D16;
padding: 0.2em 0.5em;
font-family: "Gill Sans", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif;
font-size: 1em;
line-height: 1em;
font-weight: normal;
color: #CC9;
text-decoration: none;
margin-right: 0.5em;
width: auto;
text-align: center;
white-space: nowrap;
word-spacing: 0.2em;
letter-spacing: 0.1em;
If the #header li a:visited compound selector in that rule is doing nothing (since you have <div id="header2"> on the page but not <div id="header">) then change it or delete it.