When you say the z-order, I presume you're referring to the order in which layers are stacked?
Either way I'm lost on how to do either of these.
[EDIT] Good heavens! Given your post, I typed 'j-query z-order' into google without even the remotest hope I'd find anything that even made sense, let alone provided the answer. However, I found something on the Stack Overflow site which suggested 'z-index: 99999;' as a solution to someone's stacking problem, and low and behold when I added it to the
div#gamePanel class in my CSS it worked!!
Thanks, J