I figured this would serve as a good place to post this. If anyone has any idea how to make the forums wrap around the side banners then all help would be appreciated!

It's gonna be a tough one - I assume you mean changing the width of the top 2 or so posts so the banner fits beside them then leave the rest at the full width. You'd need to edit IPB's PHP scripts to generate (for instance) the cell with the advert with rowspan="2" then all but the top 2 posts with colspan="2" (as attributes).

The problem with that is it varies a lot depending on the exact posts, screen size and so forth so it could get very messy very quickly. It's also hard to explain, the first sentence makes that pretty clear.

I know exactly what you mean, but I'm damned if I can work out the way to make it work! I think it looks quite nice with the images now though, so if no-one minds, I think I'll keep it this way rather than potentially breaking my software

i think thats the best you can do - and it looks pritty cool too