I'm sure that people who do many a strange thing enjoy doing that strange thing .... that's not to say it's a really good thing to do.
But odd layout problems like this are a very much 'tables' problems. All browsers render differently, as do different versions of the same browser. Using CSS to layout your pages can all but eliminate major version discrepancies.
With this in mind, the advice to abandon the tables layout and use CSS and semantic HTML is not too far from what my own advice would be. Your design is really quite simple. It's a 5 - 10 minute job in CSS. No tag soup. No inconsistencies. And no need to carry that HTML bloat across all your pages.
As for QUICK ... it's not our fault if fixing your code requires long posts.
But seriously, you asked for advice, the least you can do is accept it, regardless of whether or not you implement it.