BlindDown recommendations?

Hi folks,

I'm putting together a site that will have a shopping cart tab along the
 top which, when clicked, slides down to reveal the full contents of
the cart (covering the page underneath it).

When designing it and getting the styling right, I had the page display
the cart fully open by default. This worked fine - the cart can close
and open any number of times without problem[1].

However, the intention is that the cart is normally closed when the page
is loaded. When I made that the default, with display: none; the cart
would no longer open. I tried all sorts of things to fix it, or to just
see what was going on, but I confess my javascript is weak - it's why I
chose script.aculo.us in the first place :)

I've simplified the page down to these two examples:

http://www.vorivore.com/cart-slide-test-closed.html

and

http://www.vorivore.com/cart-slide-test-open.html

and the css for them is at

http://www.vorivore.com/cart-slide-test.css

(the full mockup page with cart is at
http://www.vorivore.com/vorivore-cart-mock-down.html )

I'd appreciate any advice on how to make this work - I'm a bit past my
depth here.


[1] Actually, IE fails to animate the close, and both IE and FF has a
"flash" or "blip" problem as well, but I'll settle for having it work
before I worry about details like that.

-Jim