How to print $banner; without ?
Update: Changes made to work for Drupal 6 as your tag states 6.

It looks like the system is using the standard block.tpl.php with this code:

&lt;div id="block-&lt;?php print $block-&gt;module .'-'. $block-&gt;delta; ?&gt;" class="clear-block block block-&lt;?php print $block-&gt;module ?&gt;"&gt;

&lt;?php if (!empty($block-&gt;subject)): ?&gt;
  &lt;h2&gt;&lt;?php print $block-&gt;subject ?&gt;&lt;/h2&gt;
&lt;?php endif;?&gt;

  &lt;div class="content"&gt;&lt;?php print $block-&gt;content ?&gt;&lt;/div&gt;
&lt;/div&gt;


What you need to do is add another block template file, and take away the &lt;div&gt; tags you want to eliminate.  To do this, add a template named block-module-delta.tpl.php to your active theme.

For block-module-delta.tpl.php 


Module = the module that's creating the block (views, block, etc)
Delta = the internal id assigned to the block


So if the block module made the block, and it has an id of 4, you'd name the template file block-block-4.tpl.php, and you'd put this PHP/HTML in the template file:

&lt;?php if (!empty($block-&gt;subject)): ?&gt;
  &lt;h2&gt;&lt;?php print $block-&gt;subject ?&gt;&lt;/h2&gt;
&lt;?php endif;?&gt;

&lt;?php print $block-&gt;content ?&gt;


Notice how I eliminated the &lt;div id="block-block-4" class="clear-block block block-block"&gt; and &lt;div class="content"&gt; from the template.