Problems stretching an image in a TD Tag

I have a problem that seems to only occurs in IE (i'm currently using IE8). Basically, i have web pages that consist of a header, content area and a footer. I am trying to stretch an image to be displayed as a left and right border in the content area. the image is not a solid color, so simply setting a border property would not work. In all browsers but IE, the image stretches just fine.

The site is heavily table based due to the fact that it is written for a CMS known as NetSuite. A lot of the tables and html are created by the CMS and are very difficult and tricky to modify.

You can see the page in action at - web site page

I have tried numerous combinations of height:100% and different positioning values with little help. One of the problems is that the height of th开发者_JS百科e content area is dynamically set.

The code in place now looks like this:

<table border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" width="1020" height="100%" align="center">
<tr style="height:100%;">

    <!-- left side image -->
    <td style="width:9px; height:100%;"><img src="http://www.marware.com/images/body_outer_border.png" border="0" height="100%" width="9" /></td>
    <td valign="top" width="400" align="center">
    <!-- right side image -->
    <td style="width:9px; height:100%;"><img src="http://www.marware.com/images/body_outer_border.png" border="0" height="100%" width="9" /></td>
</tr>

<td style="height:100%; position:relative;">
    <img style="position:absolute; top:0px; left:0px; width:100%; height:100%;" border=0 src="http://www.marware.com/images/body_outer_border.png" width="9" height="100%">
</td>

Make the img absoultely positioned at 0,0 with 100% width and height. And relative positioning on the td so the absolute positioning is relative to it. I'm relatively sure that this absolutely works in IE8.