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What do you think?

It may not have any direct impact or influence in search rankings. But using good css will reduce the size of web pages which is one of the criteria to rank pages in search engines.

Any more thoughts?

Designers are better persons to comment on this even though i will add my one cent.

CSS is being used to repeat background images so the image size does matter the loading time of the page and is related to SEO. The smaller the image the faster the loading will be.

Like Elan said i dont think it makes a direct impact as such. What it facilitates is.
a.) It seaparates deisgn from code, making the code structure more simple.
b.) It reduces the hurdles which A SE need to crawl to get to the content by simplifying the warppers and code use to display content.
c.) It helps to servce importance of a content for SEO and normal usre via positioning & Styling.
d.) Using CSS generally brings down the number of codes used hence increases the page load time and overall user experience.
e.) W3C CSS validation though not specifically stated may or maynot be used by search engines as a measure of sites quality, ethical practices when ranking it comapred to its competition. ( This is still under debate )

Search engines spiders are actually lethargic. They don't go through the bundles of HTML code to get to the indexed codes. Font tags and tables make HTML code cumbersome, and thus reduce the accuracy of the results. If you use external CSS files to determine the design attributes, the HTML code will be clean and will create better search engine rankings.
With CSS you can change the code without destroying the visual layout. this will help to show search engine crawlers the importance of your content.I personally saw a huge boost in rankings in fully functional CSS Web sites.Modern search engines such as Google, Yahoo and MSN love light-weighted Web sites.They want to see your content; the text, not the code. With CSS everything is possible.

CSS makes the pages less heavier than the heavyweight HTML tabular framework, which means page will be loaded faster. Above all search engine spiders love to crawl web pages with clean and light code. In toto this will improve site's SEO chances. The has a post discussing the topic.

No, it does not help SEO