Also, I recall that one of the problems in the old version (when I wrote the guide) was that the tabs and the tab content were not separate pieces and could not be moved independently in the template.
Now if you want to make the tabs vertical (by removing the floats) and place them in the left hand column, its as simple as cut and pasting this line of code in the ProfileView template to another section of the template.
<div class="astabstrip">[AS:CONTROL:TABSTRIP]div>