For the bottom of the area, if you set the line-height to 2px then it seems to show up correctly.  And for the top if you set the td to have style="line-height: 0px; height: 1px;" the top seems to show up correctly.
As for the general layout of your page, you shouldn't use a table to layout your page.  You should use divs to layout the page.  If you used divs, you shouldn't have this issue.  Tables should only be used to display data.


