to be perfectly honest with you although you say you want a solution to your table layout rather than a div layout, you really are better off with a div layout, they are more manageable and a more up to date way of designing webpages, keep all of your styling inside css files instead of within your html itself and if you must use taables break them down into smaller tables so that they are able to load faster rather than loading one humungoustable for your page. compressing your images will cut down load time too.

this page has info on optimising load time for web pages including table friendly pages http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/we...pen&l=944,t=gr