I've been working on a new site and for some reason the page has a horizontal scroll bar with no content other than what appears within the screen without scrolling horizontally. my page width is 980px with "margin-left:" and "margin-right:" set to "auto;" as recomended by the book. any suggestions?

Are you saying that when you scroll horizontally, there is no new content, so there is no reason for it?
If so, you can set the scrolling to no. However, other browsers may need that horizontal scrolling if the page doesn't fit on their screen.