Having worked on a tables-inside-tables horrorshow, I beg you please, please listen to Dr. Fine. It was tables all the way down, all used for layout and all empty except for one cell. I think. I'd have to find the notes and diagrams me and my boss came up with trying to debug that horrible thing.Tables should not be used for layout because tables are structure of the document and layout should be confined to CSS. You can't easily, if at all, move content from one data element, such as a <td> which is why people used to "slice" images back in the day. The guy who first thought of using tables for layout wrote an article, "The web is ruined and I ruined it!", lamenting his method.
As a general comment on this thread, sometimes the only way to win is not to play at all.