Normally in design mode (VS and a web page) you can still see the table even if it is set with border, cellspaceing and cellpadding set to 0. The table and the cells would appear with a light grey outline. When IE 8 is installed, the table does not appear at all, when in design mode of VS. In the HTML view you can see the html table code, that is not the problem.
<TABLE id="Table1" border="0" cellSpacing="0" cellPadding="0" width="300">
<TR>
<TD></TD>
<TD></TD>
<TD></TD>
</TR>
<TR>
<TD></TD>
<TD></TD>
<TD></TD>
</TR>
<TR>
<TD></TD>
<TD></TD>
<TD></TD>
</TR>
</TABLE>