Outlook 2013 Munging Image Markup when saving OFT email templates

Question

Apart from all the hacks, tricks, etc. out there to produce OFT emails, is there a way, via markup, to prohibit Outlook from injecting it's nifty placeholder markup (I'm assuming to facilitate the floating format button when in edit mode?)

My team and I have already tried all the tried an true methods:

1. Copy/paste rendered email/page from browser (tried IE, Google, FF) into new email message in Outlook
2. Send to self
3. Save received as OFT
4. Open saved OFT, send to self, Google, Yahoo, any all other email clients if necessary

The issue comes down to Outlook taking markup that looks like this:

<td>
    <img src="images/myimage.jpg" alt="" border="0" style="display: block;" />
</td>

And turning it into something awesome like this when it saves out the OFT:

<td>
    <p class=MsoNormal>
        <span style='font-family:"Helvetica","sans-serif";color:#1C1B1A;mso-no-proof:yes'>
            <img width=600 height=377 id="Picture_x0020_1" src="cid:image001.jpg@01CFA761.DAD40CB0" alt="">
        </span>
        <span style='font-family:"Helvetica","sans-serif";color:#1C1B1A'>
            <o:p></o:p>
        </span>
    </p>
</td>

The issue is that browser clients read the additional as a space and display padding below images now.

TIA.