One big pain that I continually run into with web parts is when you want two web parts side by side. The problem is when Web Part Zones that have a horizontal alignment, they always SCRUNCH the web parts together. This is fine if the web parts have their own predefined width, but is sucks for text. The content editor web part is especially susceptible to ugliness when in horizontally aligned zones:

Well, I found a neat way to tell the content editor web part to set its parent table cell's width to be 100%. The trick is to grab the parent table cell's ID and run some javascript in the content editor to set the width.

When you view the page source, you'll see the web part resides in a DIV, and always resides in a table cell that has a unique ID:

You'll see in the id, it's unique because of the trailing number at the end. Turns out that "4" is the fourth web part on the page and therefore 4 is stuck at the end of the ID. The MSOZoneCell_WebPartWPQ is constant, so you can use that in all your web parts regardless of ID. To programmatically get the ID of the current web part, all we need to do is stick in the _WPQ_ token in our script. The _WPQ_ token comes with the Web Part Page Services Component which is available for client side scripting on all your SharePoint sites.

Take a look at the code I entered at the end of my content editor:

By adding the document.getElementByID javascript statement, and passing the table cell ID with the _WPQ_ web part token, we can get at that object and are able to set its width to 100%.

Here's a much better presentation with two web parts side by side:

Good luck!

Phil