I wanted to lay out my site with a table. I was going to have links on the left, a banner at the top, some pictures on the right, and a center box for news in the middle. However, I wanted to be able to make the center box have a scroll bar, so there wouldn't be mounds of empty space below the navigation table cell. Is there any way to do this in HTML, or CSS maybe?

Yes, that is possible. I've seen a lot of people try some variation of that. However, it always turn out to be a bad idea.

Go to the site linked above and look for the code for "scrollable DIV".

As Corwings says it is unlikely to look good. If you are determined try it out and see for yourself.