how to fix text rendering in tables in Internet Explorer 6 and 7?

Question

When i have a table with some td having colspan=2 or larger, in IE7 and lower the text inside it is rendered only in the space of the first column. I've set an example at http://jsbin.com/ajoqo4/2. Setting the doctype to strict removes this problem in IE8 but I REALLY need it to work in IE6 and IE7 (hint: some e-mail clients depend on the rendering engines of IE6 and IE7).

Any help is much appreciated.

Answer 1

I've finally found it. I was setting the width of the spanning cells to the dimension of the first of the merged cells.