anybody know?

Have you looked at the theme preview in the admin area? Make sure the Developer Tools plugin is active, then click on the "Developers" menu item, then hit "Theming Preview." Look at the right side of the iframe (or break out of the iframe) and click on "Grid." That will show the css grids available. Inspect the elements to see how to use them.

The bottom line is, Bob, it would require some knowledge of coding. :)

It's only class names so it's not that bad. There are two class names that are important:

elgg-col and elgg-col-XofY

elgg-col-XofY does the magic for resizing. The most granular is 1of5 and the least granular is 1of1. These can be embedded. Without repeating the theming preview, you're probably interested in something like 2of5 for the left and 3of5 for the right.

For your installation, it looks like this should be changed in the page/layouts/custom_index view. I'd create a new plugin that overrides that view and copy the contents of mod/custom_index/views/default/page/layouts/custom_index.php to your new plugin as a start.

I should have said, the class names will look like:

<div class="elgg-col elgg-col-2of5">

You guys both rock! Thanks Shouvik too!!!

fixed! ... i did mention you guys rock right???