CSS all the way baby!!!!
I've been designing sites for about 6 years and some of the sites I still manage from a few years ago (before my move from the dark side) are coded in tables. I actually cringe every time I have to work with those sites cause I have to deal with spacer.gif, column width/height, hundreds of lines of code, etc. Argh!!!
If I had a test of chopping up a design and doing it in tables first and then in CSS, I'd say I'd be twice as quick in CSS (that's if I'd get that far cause I'd probably go completely mad during the table design part).
Does anyone remember the time just before you moved from table design to css? I found it so hard to get the idea, concept, etc. I had tried it a few times and just couldn't get to grips with it. I remember the first project I used pure CSS and I was sooooo chuffed to get it working. I think that's about 2/3 years ago now but they were the days that I didn't like Firefox and hated fixing sites for it. How naive I was!!! I couldn't live with FF and Firebug these days!
Oh if you don't know already... install
Firebug into FF. It lets you modify the CSS on the fly and see the changes immediately in the browser (as well as loads of other things). Great for quickly testing your CSS layout changes!
Cheers, Dave!