4
the theme in question probably has a style declaration that forces tables to 100% width. In /themes/<yourtheme>/style.css look for something like the following:
table {width: 100%;}
which says for every
table tag set the width to 100% of the container's width.
If you change this to:
table {width: auto;}
your tables should honor your HTML width attribute. Please note that this can modify the output from modules and blocks that expect that their tables will be 100% of the available size. You might have to modify the
module's templates for their output to render as expected.