I love floating layouts. I do, they ares seriously easy to understand and make life easy too. I need organization so floating seriously helps. I found a pretty awesome site that actually talked about Breaking Floats without Hacks. Pretty cool way to not worry about browser (IE) issues. I don’t design layouts anymore unless they are floated. I think my only problem is the space between the columns. I’d draw it for you but this is wordpress. If you create a layout, a floated layout of course, put some greek in there and then make sure each div has a different background color, you’ll see the space. I don’t like those spaces and I know the simple way is to just make the background color the same but what if you have images, background images (as bad as that sounds, its not) I’m just saying, when you use images instead of color, there’s a problem. If anyone knows how to cure this disease, please let me know.
Other than that “little” issue, I love creating layouts, or really, design comps, on photoshop cause that’s really how I work, and then I like to play with the markup language.
Great articles down below if you have issues with floating.
Sources:
School Blog 
i love float layouts also!. before i started school the only float i knew was absolute. eventhough it can come in handy. it can be a pain!
I may be wrong, but dont images come in with a padding? That may be why your cells are shifting when you bring them in. I guess float layouts are to HTML what loops are to Javascript. They just make it work better.
I see we found some of the same sites. Im going to check out the site where the guys were talking about breaking float without hacks. I dont even know what breaking float means so i think that will be helpful to me. I agree with you about float being cool for layouts and organization.
I’m not sure what you are referring to with the “space” issue. As for space in a column that is shorter than another, the solution is Faux Columns – see Doug Cederholm . We’ll discuss in class to clarify.