>I noticed your BR but wanted to focus on your question only in order not to appear like a HTML Nazi. Glad it worked out.

Another way to work around it with preserving the inline is with this:

TD IMG
{
   Vertical-Align: Bottom;
}

As far as the BR, it was there and I no longer use it. However, this was not the cause of the gap. This is a W3C standard and since modern browsers all follows up, when using DOCTYPE, this is a normal behavior. So, wherever I need to space something, I call a method in the framework. This method encapsulates the spacing inside a DIV with Font-Size: 0px. So, this works in HTML5 as well as in quirk mode.

But, whereas not needed, the above style resolves the issue to preserve the inline items in a table row without the disavantage of having to deal with the gap.