Table Formatting Problem!

I am currently working on updating our web site to XHMTL 1.0 and have ran
into a problem with formatting output for a page setup with 3 columns to
display text on our main web page.    Converting to the new standard I am
asked to remove the width attribute from the <td> tag and when I do this my
table's table columns are not lined up evenly and in Netscape and Mozilla
the text overlaps from my middle column to my right column, this is on the
website I am upgrading not in the examples below.    Is there any other way
to set your data cells to a fixed width?   I have played around with using
the table and rows but to do this but so far I haven't found anything else
that works.    Maybe there is another way a page can be set up into three
columns that support graphics and text mixed together in each of the columns
and allows you to display all three columns evenly across your page.   If so
I am willing to try another way, but I am not an expert web developer so
please bear that in mind.

I set up two examples on my own home site and the links are below.   If you
click on these links you can see an example of what I am talking about.

Validated XHMTL 1.0 page
http://home.attbi.com/~ronaldjbich/w3ctesting/test3column.htm

Not Validated XHMTL 1.0 page
http://home.attbi.com/~ronaldjbich/w3ctesting/test3column_out.htm

Ron Bich