Spry vertical menu bar positioning issue in IE

Question

I have been trying to fix a problem with my spry menu bar and have been looking for answers at several spry forums. I have modified my vertical spry menu to open submenus above and to the right of the main menu. It works in Opera, Firefox and Safari and opens below in IE. I tried changing the positioning from absolute to relative and that made it position itself below in all browsers. So, by deductive reasoning there seems to be something going on with IE when it reads the absolute positioning, is there a fix for this? You can see my website at raydlett.com the menubar is called STUDIO.
Here is my vertical menubar CSS:
@charset "UTF-8";
/* SpryMenuBarVertical.css - version 0.6 - Spry Pre-Release 1.6.1 */
/* The outermost container of the Menu Bar, a fixed width box with no margin or padding */
ul.MenuBarVertical
    margin: 0;
    padding: 0;
    list-style-type: none;
    font-size: 100%;
    cursor: default;
    width: 6.75em;
/* Set the active Menu Bar with this class, currently setting z-index to accomodate IE rendering bug: http://therealcrisp.xs4all.nl/meuk/IE-zindexbug.html */
ul.MenuBarActive
    z-index: 1000;
/* Menu item containers, position children relative to this container and are same fixed width as parent */
ul.MenuBarVertical li
    margin: 0;
    padding: 0;
    list-style-type: none;
    font-size: 100%;
    position: relative;
    text-align: left;
    cursor: pointer;
    width: 6.75em;
/* Submenus should appear slightly overlapping to the right (95%) and up (-5%) with a higher z-index, but they are initially off the left side of the screen (-1000em) */
ul.MenuBarVertical ul
    margin: 0 0 0 95%;
    padding: 0;
    list-style-type: none;
    font-size: 100%;
    position: absolute;
    z-index: 1020;
    cursor: default;
    width: 9.2em;
    left: -1000em;
    bottom:-1%;
/* Submenu that is showing with class designation MenuBarSubmenuVisible, we set left to 0 so it comes onto the screen */
ul.MenuBarVertical ul.MenuBarSubmenuVisible
    left: 0;
/* Menu item containers are same fixed width as parent */
ul.MenuBarVertical ul li
    width: 9.2em;
DESIGN INFORMATION: describes color scheme, borders, fonts
/* Outermost menu container has borders on all sides */
ul.MenuBarVertical
    border: 0px solid #fff;
/* Submenu containers have borders on all sides */
ul.MenuBarVertical ul
    border: 0px solid #fff;
/* Menu items are a light gray block with padding and no text decoration */
ul.MenuBarVertical a
    display: block;
    cursor: pointer;
    background-color: #fff;
    padding: 0.5em 0.75em;
    color: #666;
    text-decoration: none;
/* Menu items that have mouse over or focus have a white background and orange text */
ul.MenuBarVertical a:hover, ul.MenuBarVertical a:focus
    background-color: #fff;
    color: #FF4C00;
/* Menu items that are open with submenus are set to MenuBarItemHover with a white background and orange text */
ul.MenuBarVertical a.MenuBarItemHover, ul.MenuBarVertical a.MenuBarItemSubmenuHover, ul.MenuBarVertical a.MenuBarSubmenuVisible
    background-color: #fff;
    color: #FF4C00;
BROWSER HACKS: the hacks below should not be changed unless you are an expert
/* HACK FOR IE: to make sure the sub menus show above form controls, we underlay each submenu with an iframe */
ul.MenuBarVertical iframe
    position: absolute;
    z-index: 1010;
    filter:alpha(opacity:0.1);
/* 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.MenuBarVertical li.MenuBarItemIE
        display: inline;
        f\loat: left;
        background: #FFF;
Here are the associated global.css components:
body  {
    font-family: Verdana, Geneva, sans-serif;
    font-size: 76%;
    padding: 0; /* it's good practice to zero the margin and padding of the body element to account for differing browser defaults */
    margin: 0;
    background: #fff;
    color: #666;
    text-align: center; /* this centers the container in IE 5* browsers. The text is then set to the left aligned default in the #container selector */
    line-height: 1em;
#container {
    width: 880px;
    text-align: left;/* this overrides the text-align: center on the body element. */
    margin-right: auto;/* the auto margins (in conjunction with a width) center the page */
    margin-left: auto;
    margin-top: 0;
    margin-bottom: 0;
    position: relative;
    font-family: Verdana, Geneva, sans-serif;
#header {
    font-size: 1em;
    padding-left: 17px;
    height: 26px;
    position: relative;
ul {
    padding:0;
    margin-top: 0;
    margin-right: 0;
    margin-bottom: 10px; /* used for both menubar 1 and 2 */
    margin-left: 20px;/* used for both menubar 1 and 2 */
li {
    margin:0;
    padding:0 0 0 5px;/* used for both menubar 1 and 2 */
I have also attached the index.html file that uses the modified "STUDIO" Spry MenuBar2
Any help on this would be greatly appreciated. Thanks in advance.
ribit10

Answer 1

That makes sense, tooltips are tooltips, and appear at the tip of the mouse...But those "submenu triggers" can be simply styled links (as they are in a spry menu)...don't need to be swaps or images or image maps.
What about a using show/hide behavior? Click the STUDIO and the menu pops up adjacent in an apDiv. Click a link. Or click the x to close the apDiv.
You know this is just an exercise to run through all the Javascript and Spry that is in Dreamweaver, eh?
By the way, just providing a link to your page is quite all you need to do. You don't need to attach your files or show pictures of them...by providing a link, I can save a web page in its entirety and open it in Dreamweaver.
Beth