MetalSkin made an excellent point.
Frames were bad mouthed for a long time because of their compatibility issues. Now they've pretty much evaporated.
I don't use frames for a few of reasons. I think it's really difficult to do a site design that looks good with frames. Frames are a pain in the ass to work with. And you can still run into some issues with webcrawlers and etc.
I think it's much easier, cleaner, and better looking to use Div's and the overflow control via CSS.