ne daran lags nicht - habs aber hingekriegt:
1. border-style:solid; in den style-tag der table
2. style="border-color: #2B5580;" in die <td>-tag's der Tabelle
So ist es laut validator konformes html.
Hier noch mal der code:
<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Strict//EN"
"http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/strict.dtd">
<html>
<head>
<title>test</title>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1">
</head>
<body style="background-color: #709fcf;">
<table width="760" border="1" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" style="border-style:solid; border-color: #2B5580; border-collapse: collapse; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; color: #ffffff; font-family: tahoma; font-size: 12px;">
<colgroup>
<col width="150">
<col width="610">
<colgroup>
<tr>
<td colspan="2" style="border-color: #2B5580;">header</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td style="border-color: #2B5580;">menu</td>
<td style="border-color: #2B5580;">inhalt</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td colspan="2">footer</td>
</tr>
</table>
</body>
</html>