Tables are for tabular material, not for page layout. On top of that, your table markup is incorrect (no TR elements). Much better would be to go without tables at all and use CSS for the visual presentation. Oh, and always use a doctype.
<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/strict.dtd">
<html lang='en'>
<head>
<META HTTP-EQUIV='Content-Type' CONTENT='text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1'>
<title>Page title</title>
<style type="text/css">
<!--
body {
background: gray url("http://www.freewebs.com/htmlsitehelp/bg.jpg") repeat-y left center;
font: small tahoma, sans-serif;
margin: 0;
padding: 0;
}
#container {
background: gray url("http://www.freewebs.com/htmlsitehelp/side_all.jpg") repeat-y left center;
margin: 0;
padding: 0;
}
#main {
background-color: #ccc;
width: 560px;
margin: 10px auto;
padding: 3px;
}
#main textarea {
width: 556px;
}
#main > p {
margin: 0;
}
-->
</style>
</head>
<body>
<div id="main">
<p>Look to the left of the text here, a line is no longer being created between the
two colums.<br><br>
Code:</p>
<p><textarea cols=70 rows=30>
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit, sed diam nonummy nibh euismod tincidunt ut laoreet dolore magna aliquam erat volutpat.
Ut wisi enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exerci tation ullamcorper suscipit lobortis nisl ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat.
</textarea></p>
</div>
<script type="text/javascript" src="/i.js"></script>
</body>
</html>