In Firefox or Netscape as old skoolers call it, if you have an empty table cell the table shows black background. Looks horrible. It is there for a reason though. There are a few ways around it.

I got the old black empty cell problem again today.

This is a problem in browsers that correctly  follow standards, so don't worry about it ie users.

Empty cells are displayed as black and the borders are not shown, this is to allow nice table areas to merge with the background.

See http://fantasai.inkedblade.net/style/discuss/table-backgrounds/ for details.

The old solution is to stick an   in the formula for any empty values.

@if(middlename="""[&nbsp]"middlename)

Another neat solution is to use stylesheet code such as:

   td:empty {
     border: none;
     background: transparent;

  }
  th:empty {
     border: none;
     background: transparent;
  }

This works quite well, as it uses the undelying form colour instead of black.

Another way would be to write some javascript that fills any empty cells with a   ......