Poor IE6 Performance: Should I use DIV instead of HTML Tables (massive page!)?

I'm dealing with a massive page. It contains many html tables and usually with "width=100%", and obviously, without the definition of the columns's width. Because of that, I'm having performance problems with Internet Explorer 6. My client (a bank) uses Internet Explorer 6 with old computers, so I can't tell them (but I wish I could) to use Chrome or Firefox.

I've been reading about performance issues when IE deals with Html Table. My question is: should I define the width of the tables and columns, or switch to DIV's? I know it's possible to migrate to DIV开发者_开发知识库's after some work, but I'm not sure if IE is faster to render DIV's than html tables.

Suggestions?

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IE is faster to render DIV's than html tables

it's true. All browser renders table-free markup faster because browsers not need to wait while all the table content is loading.

Also, div-based layout is more simple to support