Look, I'm all for standards, but in the real world, with real-world web browsers, tables are sometimes the best (and sometimes the only) way to make some things work reliably. You can write perfectly compliant code, and congratulate yourself, and be all righteous about how compliant your work is, but if it won't work in certain browsers, what have you really accomplished?
Some day in the future when all browsers are perfectly standards-compliant, I'll follow that recommendation. For now, I've got client work to do, and it needs to work right in most if not all browsers, and I need to complete it in finite time. Eric Meyer agrees with me on this, by the way.
Now, there's that old-school deeply-nested-table-based nastiness that CSS saves us from, and thank God for it. I'm not talking about the byzantine table work we all used to do. I mean like a single, large table that defines the gross page structure.