Hi Welcome to Sitepoint 
1) IE always seem to have a slight jump like this when going to a new page and there's not a great deal you can do about this. It seems to redraw the page again and you see the flicker.
I would start by optimising the background image as you have it at 87k and it could be optimised down to about 29k before anyone would notice the difference.
Then I would remove the image from the table and place it on the container to start with as tables are much slower than divs by default.
I would also add table-layout:fixed to the table as this increases the rendering of the table into one pass an not two.
Code:
.pagebg {
height: 780px;
width: 980px;
table-layout:fixed;
}
#container {
margin: 0 auto;
position:relative;
width: 980px;
background: url(http://www.ehabitat.co.uk/lipau/images/pagebg.jpg) no-repeat 50% 0;
}
2) Ie6 doesn't support fixed positioning and with its low usage these days I would just give it position absolute as most of the hacks you see for making it position:fixed are broken anyway.
Code:
#imagestripdiv {
position:fixed;
left: 750px;
width: 160px;
height: 710px;
overflow: hidden;
top: 0px;
padding: 0px;
}
* html #imagestripdiv{position:absolute}
3) I didn't see a jump in any browser but I may have missed it.
The site though is an unhealthy mix of old and new and really needs converting to css and removing all those unnecessary tables and image maps. As you are a beginner I would let you get away with using one table for the left and right column with dividing border but everything else needs to be css and no tables. however, these days you should really only use tables for tabular data and the two columns should be floats instead.
There is a lot of code bloat associated with tables and we can take this section for example:
Code:
<div id="pagetitlediv">
<table width="100%" border="0" cellspacing="2" cellpadding="2">
<tr>
<td height="30" align="left" valign="top"><h1>HOME </h1></td>
</tr>
</table>
</div>
<div style="clear:both;"> </div>
It really should be just this:
At most you would need to add a class but of the headings were the same on all pages then it can be styled via context and no class needed.
The rest of the code however is redundant as you can do exactly what you want with the code above by using css to move it around and style it. There are many similar examples in the code also
You are also using absolute positioning to move elements around and that is bad also as you lose control of the flow of the document. If text is resized or content changes then it all goes to pot. It is far easier to let elements logically follow one after the other and simply use margins to push them into position. If you need horizontal alignment then you can float them.
I would expect that you could reduce the code in that page down to about 30 - 40% which will all add towards speeding thing up.
I realise a lot of what I said may go over your head but at least it will get you thinking about it
Edit:
I see Stomme posted while I was typing this but you can see we are singing from the same song sheet
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so i tried this css layout as it offered better positioning than a lot of tables, which isn't a good idea either. I am really pleased that this offers so much precision for layout and style and i'd really like to learn more. 
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