I have a similar issue with hiding / showing table data. I have a single table with two tbody elements and I have 2 buttons that toggle the display of each tbody using show() + hide(). Whenever I hide the first and display the second tbody for some reason the second tbody upon display looks like every cell has had additional padding applied to it. I've managed to fix it by adding a css style width:1% to some of the td elements. That worked for me until I can find out more about it. If you don't understand what I mean I can post up an example of the issue I had and what I've used to temporarily fix it.
Is your problem similar to mine?
