Drifting side menu help needed

Hi Folks,
you have helped me greatly with a lot of issues and now I am posting something I need help with that was done long before I started working on the www.dacc.edu website.

DACC had outsourced getting their main site template done, which was fine but we have an issue that is driving us absolutely nuts and we can not figure out how to completely fix it.


The template has a side navigation menu (which looks horrible but that's another issue) but the problem we are having is that when there is a LOT of text on the page the menu drifts downward rather than remain fixed at the top. We have found fixes for firefox (for example removing <div> tags) but the drift still happens in IE. Another section of our site was created by another 3rd party and they do not have the drift, but we can't quite figure out the difference.
here are the different pages


Non-fixed (drifts in both IE and Firefox): http://www.dacc.edu/student-handbook/faidrec.php

Fixed in Firefox not IE: http://www.dacc.edu/student-handbook/clubs.php

3rd party page no drift: http://www.dacc.edu/courses/



Any assistance you can give us on getting rid of this drift would be appreciated. I assume that there is some sort of fluid set up rather than absolute, or a float attribute somewhere but I have stared at the code for days and have not discovered the issue.