Thanks for your help guys, almost there.
I can't believe I missed the quotes since I found them missing earlier in the footer
The only problem I have now is this
Replace background="X" with style="background: X"
Just to explain what happens it seem the jpg in the original code gets stretched to fill part of the header in the height, when I change it to the code suggested it passes the XHTML but the jpg does not get streched
One bit of code that follows the code I posted above that may give a clue is this
<tr valign="top"><td>
da420 when using bgcolor that code it fills it with a color instead of the jpg