I've spent two days on this now. I've read the same posts over and over, and I've tried all the following:

1. Activating, deactivating plug-ins.
2. Looking at my footer.php file--can't find the offending code.
3. Dragging and dropping side items about a half dozen times.
4. Doing a "super refresh" on my browser.
5. Sleeping on it and hoping it will go away.

I CANNOT make the Atahualpa 3 default side items of Blogroll, Meta, Yahoo hosting, etc. go away in Firefox 3.5. I FINALLY got them to go away in IE, but STILL they persist in Firefox.

Can someone just tell me, step-by-step how to kill them off once and for all???

If you can, I will happily donate to the site. Otherwise, after a week of tinkering with this theme, I'm about to throw in the towel.

what version of Atahualpa?
as soon as you add a widget to the right sidebar, wordpress will stop displaying the default ones
same holds tru for the left sidebar.
Did you switch to atahualpa from another theme?
If so which one.

Version 3.4.4. And I guess I did switch from the default WordPress theme that starts up when you activate a blog in Yahoo Small Business. But I didn't have any content yet.

I do have widgets in the side bars. Do I need widgets in all the sidebars to make it stop? I don't have enough content for there to be much there.

P.S., I think "Kubrick" is the default theme I started from.

Okay, maybe despite my best efforts to do a "super refresh," I'm still getting a cached version. I just signed in and pulled up my blog from inside my Yahoo account, and I got it sans "Blogroll," etc. You can check www.rebeccamarmaduke.com.

it's fine in safari and firefox on the mac

Yep. I finally figured it all out. Difficult to explain why I managed to get so confuzzled.

Well, with the formatting thing resolved, the rest is up to me. Hi ho hi ho...