Poor IE6 Performance: Should I use DIV instead of HTML Tables (massive page!)?

I'm dealing with a massive page. It contains many html tables and usually with "width=100%", and obviously, without the definition of the columns's width. Because of that, I'm having performance problems with Internet Explorer 6. My client (a bank) uses Internet Explorer 6 with old computers, so I can't tell them (but I wish I could) to use Chrome or Firefox.

I've been reading about performance issues when IE deals with Html Table. My question is: should I define the width of the tables and columns, or switch to DIV's? I know it's possible to migrate to DIV开发者_开发知识库's after some work, but I'm not sure if IE is faster to render DIV's than html tables.

Suggestions?

IE is faster to render DIV's than html tables

it's true. All browser renders table-free markup faster because browsers not need to wait while all the table content is loading.

Also, div-based layout is more simple to support