Personally, I never use a th tag. I don't feel I gain much and would just rather stick with a td tag. If I need to highlight it, I'll bold it, make it bigger, etc...
However, one thing I want to point out, when you use a background image for a table, in Netscape the image will repeat for every new cell. I also tried it where I had one table with only one cell. In that table, I had the background image. Then I had another table in that one cell that did all my work. However, it still repeated every cell.
Also, I ran into problems when I tried to strecth the image because of people running on differnt screen sizes. However, for the design that my art department used, I had to use a background image. The solution I came up with was to have the bottom and the right bleed into just one color so the last few pixels were one color. That made it so the file size wasn't too big. Then I had a table with no margins, width 100%, the background the same color as what the image bled into, and made sure there was nothing after the table. Then it all seemed seamless. But I did say something to art so they wouldn't do that again.
Bill
[This message has been edited by bill bozeman (edited March 12, 2001).]