EFF needs expert HTML debugging help

By way of introduction:

<BOILERPLATE>
The Electronic Frontier Foundation is the leading civil liberties
organization working to protect rights in the digital world. Founded in
1990, EFF actively encourages and challenges industry and government to
support free expression, privacy, and openness in the information
society. EFF is a member-supported organization and maintains one of the
most linked-to Web sites in the world:  http://www.eff.org
</BOILERPLATE>

We're having a few vexing HTML 4/CSS rendering problems that I'm
seeking volunteer assistance with.  EFF is just member-supported but
volunteer-supported as well, and in that spirit, I've come here seeking
help.

There are two problem have me stumped.  Both appear to be browser
rendering bugs in need of a sane workaround.

I'm offering a bounty of one EFF t-shirt
(http://www.eff.org/images/annivshirt.jpg) and an EFF baseball cap (a
mock-FBI style hat; black with white "EFF" lettering) to the first
person who can provide a viable solution to either problem (that is,
one bounty for each of the two bugs) that we can use and which doesn't
break anything else in ways we can't reasonably work around.

The two bugs in more detail:

1) MSIE Mac 5.0 (2022) (Release 36) is placing inappropriate
whitespace, for no discernable reason, below the table that lays out
all the pages' content, under some but not all conditions.  The amount
of whitespace can get quite excessive, and worsens the more content
there is.  The problem seems to arise mostly or possibly only when
there is a nested table within the main content area.

Some pages exhibiting this problem:
  http://www.eff.org/support/index.html
  https://www.eff.org/support/joineff-visamc.html

2) Netscape 6.0 Mac (and possibly other versions/platforms, and
possibly also Mozilla) will not honor our cascaded style sheets.
Things are OK on our "regular" pages (black text on white background).
However, on some specialize pages that are black with [what should be]
white text, the text color is specified by a second stylesheet that
loads after the first.  Netscape 6 Mac is ignoring it, and producing
unreadable pages of black text on black background.

Some pages exhibiting this problem:
  http://www.eff.org/radioeff/index.html
  http://www.eff.org/blueribbon/index.html

Manay thanks in advance for any fixes that are doable, compliant with
the specs, and won't make the markup malfunctional in other browsers.
:)

PS: We are committed to as-standard-as-feasible code, and the "best
viewed with ANY browser" paradigm.  We also eschew unnecessary
gimcrackery (java, embedded content, frames, ASP, cookies, etc.)
-- 


--
Stanton McCandlish      mech(at)eff.org       http://www.eff.org/~mech
Technical Director/Webmaster         Electronic Frontier Foundation
voice: +1 415 436 9333 x105                    fax: +1 415 436 9993
EFF, 454 Shotwell St.                    San Francisco CA 94110 USA

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