Ahhhhh, i understand what you are trying to do. You want the gradient image to expand with the height of the box, yes? Well, i'm afraid that you can't do that in a cell background because the table tags don't support such functionality.
One way around it is to put the image in the foreground of the cell (i.e. as a normal image), and change the 'height=' attribute to 'height=100%'. Alas, this is NOT a standard function of the IMG tag, so you'll only get seamless results in internet explorer - anything more standards compliant such as Firefox or Opera will have a messy result. You COULD, of course, just define the height of the gradient explicitly, but this will only really be an option for the 'control' box, as the 'news' box will probably vary too much in size to make it possible to suggest a suitable dimension.
I hope this explanation helps. Its hard to put into words what I learned when developing the Biorust v3 gradient boxes, but this is the general gist of it...
