I'm using IE and a 17" monitor as well, setup at 1280 x 768.

A good thing to remember when desing websites, is that not everyone is going to have a size screen similar to yours for one reason or the other. Design to a 15" screen and around 800 x 600 and you are sure to keep the majority of browsers happy little campers.

Designing specific for screens higher than that, then causes people to not follow through with browsing, often.

White is nice, White is Virginal (depending on your point of view). My meaning is, you have a lot of white space around your elements on the page, which could be reduced to probably bring the page back into more of a non scrollable window.

Having pages resize according to a persons screen size is one way of doing it, but it can then throw out other elements on your webpages depending on the size of the persons monitor.

Remember there are people now moving their screens to wide screens and that will impact on websites as well.

To me it is always a good idea to work in colours that are pleasing to the eyes and not going to cause any eye strain or discomfort. Reason. People will stay on your site longer and look more.

Try taking note of it when you view other websites and you might start to get a feel for what I mean. It often isn't apparent until you look for it.