Stretched columns when trying to color individual cells

Question

I'm trying to make a time plan for a project using tables in LaTeX but I've run into a small problem. The table below will look fine until I try to colour individual cells by adding \usepackage[table,usenames,dvipsnames]{xcolor}. Doing this will stretch the middle column all the way out to the right edge of the paper. It does this even without me adding the \cellcolor{somecolor} command or making any other alterations to the table.

Here's a little bit more elaborate example than was originally posted:

\documentclass[a4paper,12pt]{article}
\usepackage{ucs}
\usepackage[hmargin=2cm,vmargin=2cm,a4paper]{geometry}
\usepackage{amsmath}
\usepackage{graphicx}
\usepackage[hang,small,bf]{caption}
\usepackage[T1]{fontenc}
\usepackage{fancyhdr}
\usepackage{pdfsync}
\usepackage{url}
\usepackage{verbatim}
\usepackage{parskip}
\usepackage{listings}
\usepackage{float}
\usepackage[utf8x]{inputenc} 
\usepackage{booktabs}
\usepackage{multirow}
\usepackage[table,usenames,dvipsnames]{xcolor}


\pagestyle{fancy}
\fancyhf{}


% Document start
\begin{document}

\begin{titlepage}
\begin{center}

\end{center}
\end{titlepage}

\section*{Time plan}

\noindent X\dotfill X

\noindent\begin{tabular*}{\textwidth}{r p{8cm} @{\extracolsep{\fill}} l}
\toprule
Week & Task & Date \\
\midrule
37 &\cellcolor{yellow} Project start & 2012-09-13 \\
\bottomrule
\end{tabular*}

\pagebreak

\end{document}

And here's what it looks like:

I have seriously no idea of what's going on here so any help would be much appreciated! It might be worth pointing out that I'm also using the multirow package, if that has any impact on making coloring work. All packages seems to be up to date.

Answer 1

The trick to making a good MWE is to keep removing packages that are not used by the example until the problem goes away. In this case

\usepackage{pdfsync}

is the tipping point. This presumably adds some whatsit nodes to enable the sync to happen that are messing up the colortbl spacing.