How do I get my 1.2.7 theme back with 1.3.5

Ahhh - you are right - I did misunderstand :)

I hope the the W3C tut's help you in converting your template :)

It's true that I hadn't done the mechanics of web design until I started actually working on Zen Cart (just as v1.3.0 came out), but I do have 30+ years of various kinds of professional design experience. I didn't say that I didn't understand tables, just that I had never used them (and won't, except for tabular data!), so don't have a feel for how they behave. If you had told me what image you wanted, I could have suggested a couple of ways to do it. E.g. instead of the nine gifs you need for the table border and background, I would put one gif in the div background with some padding inside the edge, or margins around the contained elements, as appropriate. The approach depends on information you didn't give, such as fixed/liquid sizing and how the content should look.