[Erwin]

It was not in a table in vB2 because the postbits in vB2 were designed by default to be in their own tables, and such a wide post would not affect the whole thread - putting showthread in a table in vB2 defeats that, so it was never put in a table.

In vB3, since the postbits are all in the same table anyway, I thought we can put it back in the table, as it looks better.

Also, for me anyway, showthread loads just as fast as before, basically because the images are all cached from previous pages anyway.