If you are setting heights, you will need to make them multiples of the image height; otherwise you will see partial bits of the image at the bottom. Background images are unaware of the height of an element.
Yes, setting heights is not a good idea, really, but it sounded like you might be doing it from what you said above.
To be honest, I can’t think of another solution. I’m sure others will comment, though, and there are a lot of creative/knowledgeable people in this forum, so stay tuned!
We’d probably need to see what effect you were going for to hep further.
If the bullet is supposed to be aligned with some text then you would be better applying it to each element and then it will only show if that element is present.
If its’ just a repeating graphic for effect then you can’t make it stop exactly (although css3 should address this issue with the round property). For now you would need to ensure your page stops at the right height which you may be able to do by adjusting the line-height and margins of the elements you are using but I don’t think it will give a decent result.
You could do it with some js to work out the size and adjust accordingly.