I've been working on converting an internal application from MSAcess to a web app. I've taken the chance to update my web knowledge and update our internal standards. I'm still studing the CSS specs and examples, so there may be problems that I havn't encountered or understood yet.
But what I have been doing that has worked well so far is to use class based selectors for everything. My motivation for doing so was entirly based on the problems of sharing ID based sheets between multiple pages and programmers though, not anything to do with inheritance problems.
To me, ID based selectors seems to be for putting little page specific tweeks on top of your general style sheet.
Jay