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.