APEX

I put a "shuttle" item in the middle of my page, and now items that were placed next to each other have a big gap between them. I've tried putting a "start and stop table" before and after the shuttle, which shrinks the gap between items on the same line, but practically butts them next to each other whereas before there was a decent amount of space separating them. It's hard to explain without a screenshot, but I'm hoping someone can point me to some HTML attribute that needs to be set.

Basically, how can I control items so when the are on the same line, they line up consistently each time?