Unfortunately this is a choice you will have to make based on how much time you have left and also on what the criteria for the project was.
If you were asked to create the site with the techniques you have used then you will probably need to stick with what you have learned so far (but I would question the validity of such a task). If you were given a free hand to code it as you wished and you had plenty of time left then I would use current best practices as your guidelines and go with the css approach.
I think you have the answers to most of the questions you answered.
As I said the flash is still in tables so you only need copy those sections from my code and the relevant css if you don’t want to change your whole page. Just compare the html with yours and see what changes were made. It shouldn’t take you more than 30 minutes or so to do. Most of it is removing the old attributes from the tags as they are not needed in most cases anyway.
