This is the side bar

This is the middle text. It has a minimum width. This text should be centered in the window when ever possible, however should be pushed to the right when the window is made too narrow, so as not to overlap the side bar.

Works ok/same under IE and Firefox. This works perfectly under firefox, but under IE the empty margin at the right hand side is taken into account, and this creates a horizontal scroll bar into empty space, which causes me other design problems. Is there a better way to achieve this behaviour?