The problem is that when I have two a hrefs next to each other the padding is screwed in joomla. anyways here is what I did

Yes fixed padding on both IE and FireFox, here is the CSS Code

a.mainlevel:link, a.mainlevel:visited {

display:-moz-inline-box;
display:inline-block;
padding:10px;
}

the html code

<a class=”mainlevel” href=”link1.html”>Link1</a>

<a class=”mainlevel” href=”link2.html”>link2</a>

a good thing to know is that inline-block can have height and width =D