Theme table works like a charm, here's one example I took out my current project (and stripped it from unneeded stuff) so you can just copy it, and see that setting style works (D6):

<?php
  $rows = array();
  $rows[0][0] = array('data' => '1');
  $rows[0][1] = array('data' => '2');
  $rows[0][2] = array('data' => '3');
  $rows[0][3] = array('data' => '4');
  $rows[0][4] = array('data' => '5');
  $rows[0][5] = array('data' => '6');
  $rows[0][6] = array('data' => '7');
  $rows[1][0] = array('data' => 'a');
  $rows[1][1] = array('data' => 'b');
  $rows[1][2] = array('data' => 'c');
  $rows[1][3] = array('data' => 'd');
  $rows[1][4] = array('data' => 'e');
  $rows[1][5] = array('data' => 'f');
  $rows[1][6] = array('data' => 'g');
  print theme_table(array(), $rows, array('class' => 'a-table-class', 'style'=> 'width: 400px;'), NULL);
?>

If it doesn't display as expected, check if you've maybe overridden theme_table in your theme.

On Thu, 2010-10-28 at 18:14 -0700, Blake Senftner wrote:
Hmmm... I have the following logic in a module's hook_view() creating a table out of programmatically generated information:


  $header =  array(t($node->title), t('Values:'));
  $rows = array(array('<strong>Project status:</strong>', $statusMarkup), 
                array('<strong>Notes:</strong>',          $node->content['body']['#value']),
                array('<strong>Images:</strong>',         $imagesMarkup),
                array('<strong>Image Tags:</strong>',     $imageTagMarkup),
                array('<strong>Reconstructions:</strong>',$reconsMarkup),
                array('<strong>Actions:</strong>',        $actionsMarkup));
  $table = theme('table', $header, $rows, array('style' => 'width: 770px', 'class' => 'form-item'));
  $node->content['body']['#value'] = $table;


Notice that portion where I declare the width of the table to only be 770px? That is being ignored... I've tried variations like:


array( 'width' => '770px', ...) [note not 'style' here] and array( 'style' => 'width: 77px;', ...) [note added semicolon here]


When I don't use the 'style' attribute, the sticky-header gets a style setting with the width set to '877.617px;', so it looks like the 'style' usage is what I need, but I'm not finding the magic combination...


any advice? 

Sincerely,
-Blake