Avoid height adjustment of column in table

Hello experts

I'm in the process of putting a site together with the following layout:

+---------+---------------------------------------------------------------------------------+
| Logo    | Header Text                                                               HeaderImage|
| Logo    +---------------------------------------------------------------------------------+
| Logo    |                                                                                                      |
|            |                                                                                                      |
| Menu   |                                         BODY                                                     |
| Menu   |                                                                                                      |
| Menu   |                                                                                                      |
|            |                                                                                                      |
+---------+---------------------------------------------------------------------------------+

Note that the height of the logo is much bigger than the height of the Header row. I've put together some HTML which basically does what I need (attached below).

Problem: If there are just a few lines of BODY content, the browsers (IE+FF) will increase the size of the header row.

How can I avoid this? In other terms - what can I do to force the browser to always use a fixed height for the header text?

(I've also tried pure CSS without tables, but that created too many problems with different browsers, so I had to get back to a table-based solution).  

Current HTML code:

<table width="100%" height="100%" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="maintable">
   <tr>
      <td class="navcol" rowspan="2">
         <a href="../index.php"><img src="../_images/logoani.gif" width="162" height="114" border="0" /></a>
         <?php echo $omenu->make_menu_text($selmnu, $mnuconfig, TRUE, array(TRUE, TRUE)); ?>
      </td>
      <td class="toprow">
         <img src="../_images/headtopright.gif" width="324" height="40" align="right" style="float:right "/>
         <?php sometext(); ?>
      </td>
   </tr>
   <tr>
      <td class="bodycol">
         <img src="../_images/startbild.jpg" width="580" height="329" border="0" />
      </td>
   </tr>
</table>


And here's the CSS I'm using, for whatever it's worth:

.maintable {
      table-layout:fixed;
}

.toprow {
      background-color:#CCCCCC;
}

.navcol {
      width:162px;
      max-width:162px;
      background-color:#0066FF;
}

.bodycol {
      height:100%;
      vertical-align:top;
}

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