I would like to have a 5 - 10px gutter (transparent space) between the side bars and the center column.

I am sure I can create a back ground image that has the edges transparent but that won't scale well so I would have to turn off resizing.

I have search the forum and can't seem to find any similar requests.

Any help would be most appreciated.

After spending hours searching and browsing the forum to noavile as soon as I posted this query several possible solutions appeared in similar links. That solved my problem. I set the width of the inner sidebars to 10px and left them empty. Since I don't plan on using them this will work great. Thanks for all of your help.