richbate,
Thanks for the feedback. Sorry, slow reply but never received notification of your question, and I haven't been back here for a while.
In my site, sidebar sits at the top and sidebar2 sits at the bottom. The top one is designed for text (links), and the one at the bottom holds the other text links to pages and categories.
I'm not sure you can fix the the grid within a frame, as it has to flex for the content. Not quite sure what you are trying to achieve, but I suspect you will need to customise the index file and the sidebar files to accommodate the content you want to include.