I would do it not to fix the zoom problem, but because it's the Right Thing To Do. Having text links makes the page more search engine friendly, makes the page smaller and load faster, and makes it look better (no JPEG degradation of the text!). It also makes site maintenance easier; you can, if you like, swap out that image without changing anything on the rest of the page.
You can do it in CSS without the use of tables. An in-depth explanation is probably beyond the scope of a single reply here, but briefly, you'd set up a styled <div> with float: top for the image, and a styled <div> for the text links underneath. Or even pin the image to a specific location on the page by specifying an absolute position in the css for that image.
