IE Table Spacing Kludge

It took me about 2 hours to work out why my table kept showing a gap underneath it. Wehn you have a 40px image on the corner, then the middle content cell has a background color that extends _below_ the image size, even though you have specified every possible height to 40px, and set all possible spacing to 0px, it is VERY annoying!

I eventually found this: http://www.draac.com/tabletricks.html
Check the first part. Very interesting. A trvial [typical IE]hack but ruins the alignment of my table tags :(