Mysterious Page Loading Twice Issue

Today I dealt with a very mysterious issue.
Every time a page would load, it seemed to reload.

I cannot actually explain what was happening to be honest... but i was able to track down the culprit to a problematic table tag:
<table border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" width="100" background="#DEEFEF" id="sidebartable">

the problem ended up being in the background tag...
once I changed this background tag to bgcolor it worked fine!
<table border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" bgcolor="">


This was some extremely bizarre behavior and what I did to debug it: I disabled pieces of code until I could isolate where the issue was stemming from. Even then, it took me a while to see that the tag and fix it. I ended up spending a good 2 hours just isolating the piece of code that was causing the issue. I would never have guessed; I honestly still can't explain it. If you know what is going on, I would love it if you told me.