Jon
Thanks for your interest and response.
I'll be able to make some recommendations to our client - basically to lose the background tab images and use a solid colour background. That way, difference in menu position, width and height does not make such a serious impact between browsers.
DIV may be more appropriate than SPAN, because as you say, SPAN is an inline tag and the menus are basically individual elements (better suited to DIV). Allowing for tables at the root (I'm reading into this that you'll be allowing this as an option) is also a great idea and should go some way towards providing greater flexibility.
At the same time, I'm reluctant to just jump in and say "you should do it this way" as I haven't been an active member in this project to date, and there's no doubt a lot of background and history as to why past decisions have been made. Clearly you've put in a lot of research and effort - and to have 3rd party "experts" jump in and offer advice may not be as helpful as it may seem at first.
In the meantime, I'll be able to go back to our client, and say I've discussed this with the developer of the menu system and they can't have custom tabs on each menu item for this release, AND have it looking exactly the same in Firefox - for this release anyway. This will be workable for me.
Thanks again for your input.
Ian