[bobk]

i only managed to get it to display right in IE

Heh, that's my experience with about 90% of CSS stuff. For that matter, CSS support seems to vary among the various browsers just as badly as traditional HTML.

The thing about tables and long load times isn't such an issue in the days of broadband. There are a couple of things you can do to speed 'em up, though, and to spare your dial-up users the worst of the delays. Best tip is to be sure to set height and width attributes for any image that's displayed in a table. That way, the browser will render the table as soon as it knows the dimensions (ie after the HTML has loaded but before it gets the image file).

I dunno... as a webmaster, I'd rather answer questions about slow load times than mucked-up CSS rendering in obscure browsers.