Bill, you could limit the number of entries shown.  Under news module settings/items to show - I limit it to 10 or so, so that the user doesn't have to scroll to far down the page.  I hope this helps.

Jay,

First, limiting the number of entries will help somewhat, but won't get you the solution.  The -1 value just is a value that the module uses to determine if all entries should be shown.  Setting any other negative value will have no affect.  It's just a paramter that passed and tested in the chosen XSL file used to render the feed.

Since your source feed sends varying length descriptions, you can try to create a custom XSL to limit the number of chars to use in the description.  However, you will need to know some XSL to do it.  Also, it is possible to style the module from the XSL, where you could add the some constraints and 'look' and 'feel' type of characteristics.  What I'd do is copy the default.xsl and modify it, load it into my portal n area, then it could be set as the module's XSL.

I know this is simplifying more than a bit, but it's hard to give you a lot of info. in one post. However, even with this approach, It's not always possible to align modules perfectly...