classes and tables

Can the use of classes on a page mess with the way explicit tags work? I'm building some stuff for a page at work and most of the page uses classes built on the company intranet template, but I'm trying to build just a simple table and I want the mess with the vertical alignment in it. None of the classes available do this so I was going to just do it explicitly ie..

or more percicely

but this isn't producing any results (the cell content is still at the top of the cell). I'm I just overlooking something very obvious or are the table atributes explecting to be spelled out in a class and there for not reading my explicit instructions?

can you provide with more code? like, what class are you calling, how do you call it, etc...