Gerben, you beat me to the punch. In light of Tantek’s excellent article and day 17, I’m trying to do away with hacks where possible and the * html hack it a prime candidate. So I modified the CSS a bit and used

tbody tr.odd td { ... }

for the non-compliant browsers and then used

tbody tr.odd > td { ... }

to feed the correct declarations to the good browsers.

Seems to work a treat.