Text alignment in headers on custom templates

[tgmorris]

I'm using a purchased style on my vb board that has a slight misalignment issue. While it's most noticeable on WOL it does show up elsewhere. The problem isn't really unique to the style I'm using at it happens on The Admin Zone and vb.org as well - see the attached image for a sample.

Looking at the html it would seem that things should be OK. The only resolution I found was to shrink the graphic down to only 1 px bigger than the font size used in the 'thead' css. All the sites that have the problem have a large graphic (15px or 16px vs the standard 12px). As expected, temoving the image clears up the problem as does converting the 'span' into separate table cells - but that causes other issues like having to change a buch of templates.

While this a fairly minor problem does anybody know how to "properly" resolve it using the larger, more legible, images?