And the nay sayers said it could not be done, but with a little CSS trickery I was able to switch the sidebar in the twenty-ten theme to the left side. I used a child theme which reads in all the other style elements from twenty ten then added this below.
Here is the CSS
#primary,
#secondary {
float: left;
overflow: hidden;
width: 220px;
min-height: 500px;
background-color: #A7350E;
padding: 20px 10px;
}
#container {
float: right;
margin: 0 0 0 -260px;
width: 100%;
}
#content {
float: right;
margin: 0 0 0 260px;
}