I have been using dreamweaver since the caveman days. i am not a pro by far and I do love it for its shortcuts, the fact that you can easily inport stylesheets and other things.
Lately I have noticed that my dreamweaver design never matches up to what I see online and recently i have found myself trying to fix errors that dont even exist!
As as example, I created my portfolio site recently and found that there was a large amount of padding between the header and the content area. Dreamweaver was obviously acting up and it meant i had to check up on all the browsers to make sure I was happy with the result.
I have recently taken up to using Topstyle and also notepad ++ but i think I prefer topstyle.
Can anyone shed any light on DW faults or give me your views on what I should do.
As a sidenote I am trying to get into freelancing, I am not even in an IT based job so want to work alone, DW gave me the speed albeit lots of erros that i needed to fix later 
I used it alongside blueprint css (love it or hate it, i think it does what it says on the tin)
Anyway enough of my rambling on! Love to hear your comments 
Two things:
As you’ve noticed, Design View sucks. Even with the latest DW based on Presto, Opera’s rendering engine. The solution to this, if you want to continue using DW, is to only rely on actual browsers for seeing your code. So, you have DW open, and you have all your browsers open, and when you save a change in DW, go to each browser and f5 f5 f5… this gives you accurate feedback. Use the browsers’ developer tools to “see” your float dimensions or margins or whatever, instead of Design View.
Second, the FTP function is known for security Swiss cheese. I don’t know when or if they’ve fixed this. I hear people say they really like the built-in FTP in DW, but I wouldn’t use it unless you know you have a patched version.
Third, you can go ahead and try cold-turkey: frankly, DW is an overpriced, glorified text editor. Maybe try out a real demon of a text editor like vim and see if that appeals to you. Those kinds of editors have steep learning curves, so maybe not for you, but you can give it a try.
Somewhere around here there’s a thread with a huuuuuuuge list of free and cheap text editors with all kinds of features. You can try out as many of the free ones as you want, if you think there’s one out there who is your soul mate, waiting for you to discover it.
There are also IDEs that do everything plus teh kitchen sink that have basically a bunch of programs bundled together… like DreamWeaver except even more. Like Eclipse, or Padre. If you do like the idea of one program doing everything you need to do.
I use a plain old text editor and SSH, so, separate programs. But having the browsers all open and checking every change in them will hold true as a Best Practice no matter what editor you choose.