Hey Kitcatkrazy,
A good way to know when you should use quotes is whenever you use an equal sign. For instance your example should now look like this: <td width="92" background ="http://ti2auctiva.com/ti/minty_rt.gif" rowspan="2">
Another thing to note is that I removed thecharacters: " ../" in "http://ti2auctiva.com/ti/minty_rt.gif" because this is one of the problems causing your background image to not appear. In essence you have told computers looking at this code to go to an address that does not exsist.