Menu issue with IE8 on Win XP Pro

Question

Thanks in advance for any help you can offer.  I've spent the better part of 3 days trying to resolve this issue.  The link to my mockup page follows below and contains the example SpryMenu as well as a table of successes and issues based on browsers tested.  Most all (FF/Chrome/IE9) work close to what I had hoped, barring some small issues.  But IE8 (latest rev) on a Win XP Pro (SP3) just doesn't want to cooperate. Since that's a pretty high percentage of audience participation, I'd like to straighten this out, with your help.  Basic problem is, once the Menu loads, the buttons "white out" for a brief moment before providing the "hover" color (.gif).  There's more about the experience here:  http://parkplace.coffeecup.com/spry/

Answer 1

Another 8 hours wasted, thanks Microsucks.  So...if you're still interestd, here is the trick I learned. I needed to change the background color of the "HACK FOR IE:" to be the same as my hover color:
/* HACK FOR IE: to stabilize appearance of menu items; the slash in float is to keep IE 5.0 from parsing */
@media screen, projection
    ul.MenuBarHorizontal li.MenuBarItemIE
        display: inline;
        f\loat: left;
        background: #7F7F7F;  /* <<<--- this is what causes buttons to appear odd when you hover over them in some versions of IE (in my case 8.0.6001....) */
Needless to say, I'm both a happy camper, but very unhappy with Microsoft's implementation of all things HTML.