This is only happening in IE, when I place the table labelled -- middle table -- into this HTML, the alignment of the parent table gets messed up and the width="250" on the first TD gets ignored it seems. (The select box should start at 250 pixels from the left of the page, however it doesn't. Remove the table labelled -- middle table - and the alignment works as it should. Why is this happening?

```
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN"
        "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" lang="en" xml:lang="en">
<head>
<title>asdf</title>
</head>
<body>
<table id="tbl_container" width="1300" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" border="1">
 <tr style="height: 50px;">
  <td align="center" style="width: 250px;"><img src="logo.gif" alt="asdf" /></td>
  <td valign="middle" align="left" style="text-align: left;"><span class="bold">asdf:  </span><select class="form_select_"><option value="asdf">asdf</option></select></td>
 </tr>
 <tr id="row_container" align="left" valign="top">
  <td colspan="2">
<!-- middle table -->
   <table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" border="0">
    <tr>
     <td style="width: 250px;" align="left" valign="top" id="nav_container"></td>
     <td style="width: 25px;" align="left" valign="top"></td>
     <td id="dat_container" style="width:1000px;" align="left"></td>
    </tr>
   </table>
  </td>
 </tr>
 <tr style="height: 50px;">
  <td></td>
  <td></td>
 </tr>
</table>
</body>
</html>

```