Well, I took to heart what you all have said, and I must admit, I was hasty in my irrational statement earlier. It was going on 3 days trying to figure out CSS and all this, and it was really getting to me.
I decided to validate and do what it said, but still using a mixture of HTML tables and CSS (with a XHTML 1.0 Transitional doctype) and I finally received green!
http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=ht...2Fdefault2.asp
Thanks guys for not pounding me too hard.
And a word to those of you who might read this and are having a hell of a hard time trying to figure css, doctypes and w3 standards out - patience! (it turned out that once I set my doctype correctly, fixing the other errors were relatively easy)