Meh. Bloody themes. Whose idea was this anyway?

I've got the board index and message index sorted the way I want them. Very simple coding, totally bulletproof, and a clean look that stays aligned and tidy at any width.
The entire tables in both case are declared as block display to break the rows and cells free of table restrictions. Board index icon cells are floated left, set to a fixed 72px on the more spacious screens. The two icon columns on the message index are (yep, you guessed it) also floated and are set to 36px each. Stats cells are absolute positioned to the right, set to 18% width.
Info/subject cells just sit between to those, with a 67px margin on the left (+5px padding that stays on all resolutions) and a 21% margin on the right (21% to give it a bit of leeway when things start scrunching). Needs hardly any media query tweaking for narrow screens. Just drop the stats cells and board descriptions, drop one icon column off the message index, tighten up the board index icon cells to 50px, set the remaining message index icon column to match that, and adjust the margins on the info/subject cells. Sorted.

Display template still needs a bit of tweaking for buttons arrangements and spacings. The default is too crowded with crap.

I'm going to remove the (rarely used) next/previous topic buttons from the top of the page, and just have the page index and the "go down" link with the standard buttonlist.
At the bottom of the page do it the other way: remove the standard "go up" link (because there's a global one in the footer anyway) and have the next/previous topic buttons down here. I'll amalgamate them into one long bullet, like the page index, to save a bit more width. May also trim the width of the page index slightly. I'm also shunting the moderation buttons, jump-to and linktree down out of the way to keep the button area less cluttered. Should be better for all-round usability.
So yes, a bit more bug fixing (keep finding them

) and then will do another zip.