Removing <p></p> from the_excerpt() output?

I am having trouble with the html that WordPress adds to things like excerpts and such.

I have kind of a tight layout in mind and when I call the_excerpt() from within the Loop, WordPress encases the given excerpt in <p> tags when displaying in the browser. Also does this to the post content when I use the_content()

This is causing vertical height problems in my layout, I don’t want the extra blank lines in there.

Is there a way to customize the output of these WP tags? I looked in the post-template.php file but couldn’t grasp what it was doing 🙁

Any help would be much appreciated!