conditional formatting

Hello,
I am a not very experienced user of excel 2007.
I have a row of figures in a table, some cells may be blank. I total the highest 3. With help from past forum threads I have achieved this.
I now want to conditionally format these 3. Ideally I would prefer to format the non blank cells that are not included in the best 3.
The problem with using the standard selection of largest is that if the 4th highest is the same as the third, 4 are highlighted (1st row in attached).
Specifying bottom no. is worse due to empty cells (row 2).
My formula for totalling does not work when inserted into conditional formatting.
Some help much appreciated.