Per JavaDoc and tallison, XWPFTableCell#getVerticalAlignment() should return null if valign is not set. Patch from prasad-babu. This closes #30 on GitHub. https://github.com/apache/poi/pull/30#issuecomment-186224438
poi/trunk/src/ooxml/java/org/apache/poi/xwpf/usermodel/XWPFTableCell.java