nestling punbb in a table scales the board?

I'm nestling a customer service punbb forum inside a table structure for a website I'm creating for my workplace...by this I mean that the forum is integrated as a cell in an html table structure...the forum is framed by a header of about 150 pixels height, and a left side logo bar of about 25 pixels wide that runs down the length of the forum, and a footer; the vertical scrolling is normal and the rest of the screen between these three table cell 'framework' pieces is for punbb, but it scales the entire board automatically when nestling it between the HTML 'framework' in the header and footer php files.  I wouldn't care except that the font size is reduced to a point where IE starts antialiasing it just so you can read it, which won't fly.  the text needs to be nice and big and clear.  any ideas how to turn off this "auto-scaling"?  Is it just a percentage size somewhere that's turning global on me?  I've been kicking it around for hours, and it's getting pretty frustrating.  Thanks for your help!

-Luke Pederson