HTML Table producing weird results

I'm a newbie, with about two weeks' hands-on experience of trying to build a website, so I ask for your patience if the answer to this question is simple and I should have spotted it.

I'm trying to set up a simple page on our website to give info about surveys that we offer as services to clients. The easiest way to see and convey the info is in a table.

I've set up a page in Drupal where the HTML code includes the table, a fragment of which is shown here:

Number	Description	Class
ENVIRONMENTAL RESPONSIBILITIES
7110	EHS Generalist	S
7111	EHS Management Responsibility	S
7112	EHS Operational Control	S

When I save this code, Drupal inserts space equivalent to the length of the table before the first row. The full table is about 30 rows, and the site shows a long space before the table starts. If I halve the number of rows in the table, the space above is also halved. If I remove the HTML tag

, the text is reproduced as standard text, with no table formatting, but also with no gap before the text starts.

I don't want the spacing before the table; I just want it to show normally. Is there some setting I'm running up against? It doesn't appear to be a CSS issue; I've tried running it with all CSS disabled, and the page still renders the same way (although of course without any of the text formatting etc. that the style.css sheet would give me).

Viewing the site through a Mozilla browser (actually it's SeaMonkey). The effect is the same if I use IE.

Can anyone help please? Thanks in advance.

(Subsequent to posting this: The posting in this forum doesn't leave any space, but it's also not picking up on the "TABLE" tag. This isn't working properly either.)