hover attribute of CSS used with tables

i've seen a lot of examples of how to use a:hover to create rollover effects with links in CSS.
i tried doing the same thing with a <td> tag :
td {background-image:"image1";}
td:hover {background-image:"image2";}

the above did not work for me. is it even possible ? or am i limited to rollover effects in <a> tags only ?
and if it is possible, does the solution confirm to xhtml 1.0 strict ?

element:hover will work in supporting browsers. This excludes IE.
What browser are you using?

Also, it is CSS and so will not effect XHTML validation.
You can validate your CSS http://jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator/

first of all thanks degsy for the quick reply.
second : upon closer examination of the forum i found out my question was already answered quite extensively in a previous thread. sorry for repeating it

could you post a link to that thread...
I'd like to know myself.

I know that you can use :hover on paragraphs, but not aure about TD's..?

in theory (and everything but IE it seems ...) you should be able to use hover with a lot of things.
the link that helped my specific problem is this : http://forums.devshed.com/t56481/s.html
(i spent 2 hours re-reading the entire CSS2 documentation before i found out it didnt work because of an IE bug .. )