barborahollan on "Tables in posts / HTML editor"

I have a html website I'm moving over to wordpress. I have created a theme, but now I'm facing a problem that's driving me nuts and I just can't seem to find any solution. I'm trying to move over the content. On a few pages, i want the content to be organized in tables. Basically, I have two columns of text devided by a image (a line). each of these three elements is placed in their own cell/column. BUT. When i copy the code over to the html editor, the content starts to live a life of it's own, doing anything but behaving like a regular table. The main problem is that when i remove the <p> tag from the image, it presses down the content of the other two columns. When i keep the <p> tag, i get a line break that i do not want. In the WYSIWYG it looks just fine. I've even tried text control, but still it seems to be living a life of it's own, creating a table from scratch using TinyMCE Advanced. Still, the image keeps playing with the content. Does anyone have a tip of how to force the html editor to actually behave like a html editor, and avoid any other random formatting?
Thanks heaps!