Table looks fine in IE and in FF with borders on; not in FF when off

[hackwriter]

I have a table that's a template header for a group of HTML documents. This table holds some image snips that when put together create a whole.

Here's the code snippet:

<table width="100%" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0">
 <tr> 
 <td width="101" height="127" rowspan="3" valign="top">
  <img src="/images/homepage_hdr_left2.jpg" width="101" height="127" alt=" ">
 </td>
 <td width="28" height="76">
  <img src="/images/homepage_hdr_middle2.jpg" width="28" height="76" alt=" ">
 </td>
 <td width="487">
  <img src="/images/homepage_hdr_title.jpg" width="571" height="76">
  </td>
  <td style="background-color:#E7DACA;">
  </td>
 </tr>

If I set the table for "border=1", the table looks just fine in both IE and FF. If I turn the border off, the table blows out horizontally in FF and formats the way it wants to, so that there is white space around the images. Additionally, the color in the right-hand cell (the empty one) is white, not the color indicated.

Any thoughts as to how to address this?

Thanks.

[iamlost]

FF (and IE5!) seem to dislike the empty <td>.

You can see this by adding some text:

<td style="background-color:#E7DACA;">Some Text</td>

Including a width appears to be liked by all:

<td style="background-color:#E7DACA; width: 100%;"></td>