hi richard,
the best solution is probably not to use the tables in scribus.
basically: if you can achieve the result with scribus table, you should have use tabulators instead...
... if you can't achieve the result with scribus, you should create your table in open/libreoffice and import it from there as pdf or svg.
if you can show what kind of tables you want to create i can give you some more hints
ciao
a.l.e