Question: This is going to be a vague and obscure question, which is probably due to the fact that even using IE Web Developer, I have no idea what is going on.

I have a utility which I am working on. It's mostly JavaScript, and it has a small floating DIV user interface that shows up on a page. So far, standard stuff. The problem is the background color of some DIVs in the UI. The colors are assigned by CSS, and (tired refrain:) it looks fine in Firefox, Chrome, and Opera, but of course IE is being difficult.

The background does not show up in IE in quirks mode or IE7 mode, but it does in IE8 mode. For the life of me, I can't seem to figure out why IE7 isn't showing the background.

The page you can see the offending code is here: [Log Hound Demo](https://facets-loghound.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/src/main/javascript/loghound.html). Floating DIV is in the upper-right-hand corner - click the "V" to open it up.

Looking at that page in IE and then in [any other browser on the planet] will show you the missing background colors easily enough. I swear, even Lynx renders it better... ahem. The offending DIV IDs are lhPlateHead, lhPlateCtrlPanel,lhPlateTagPanel - easy to find with Firebug at least. They should be heeding the .lhPlateColor class with a background color of #DFEAF8, but that color is never applied.

With IE web developer up, I tried removing the CSS classes and re-adding them. I tried every combination of browser and document mode - again, only IE8 browser mode in IE8 document mode had the background colors working.

If anyone is bored enough to take a look and figure something out, I'd be much obliged.

Answer: 
Try adding `zoom:1` to whatever element the background color doesn't work on.
I believe the issue has to do with how IE paints table cells. Try putting in a IE only CSS rule that applies the background color explicitly to TD's. Like this:

```
.lhWarnMsg .logMsg td
{
 * background-color: #fbffbf;
}

```

Hopefully that will work for you.