This is bugging me no end. I did a five minute design for a friend of mine who's putting together a little sports site - yes, literally five minutes for the visual design and coding, not a minute more (logo by S.o.S. Factory - nice work Sergio!).

As usual, Internet Explorer is up to its old tricks again, but this one is absolutely the most puzzling problem I've ever seen.

Using IE, go to http://www.greatsportsguru.com/ - if you like U.S. sports, read what he's written. This guy is gooooooood!

Roll over the links at the top of the page. When the cursor touches any portion of the HOME cell, it changes color, as it should. Now try this with the other four links. The other cells only change color when you hover over the words themselves. I can't see anything different about these links in my HTML or CSS. I'm absolutely lost as to what could be going on.

I know I could fix this in IE by just using JavaScript event handlers/DOM, but I'd prefer not to do this. If IE did the box model correctly, I wouldn't need those table cells either. Alas...

This design will be going away soon, and I'm really not worried about the effect it will have on the site. I'm just puzzled, and I know there are a few people here who like to solve little mysteries like this.

So have at you! :D

Too baffling, very weird.

So it's not just me then! I thought maybe I had a corrupted IE (it's been acting funny in general - go figure), but the same thing happens on my laptop too. Before I went looking for some network infiltration, I figured I'd make sure other people saw this too.

Like I said, hands down this is the absolute strangest IE bug I have ever encountered...ever. I'm the first one to tell someone that 99% of the time, if something doesn't work properly in the browser, it's a coding error. This doesn not appear to be a coding error. *sigh*

Any and all insights are welcome, even if you just post to say you're stumped too. I'll feel like less of a dumbass if I'm not alone, so please let me know what you see and if you've figured it out (or not)!

And now...I'm going to bed :)

Yep I am one of those who likes to figure these things out and if I didn't have such a bad headache I would be looking more into it until I MADE it work, lol. I figure them all out eventually.

I got it, it was bugging me.

Use this in the stylesheet instead.

body { background:#008; color:#EFEFEF;
font-family:"Lucida Sans Unicode","Trebuchet MS",Tahoma,
Arial,Helvetica,Sans-serif ;
font-size:85% ; margin:0px ; padding:0px }
table, tr, td, ul, ol, li { font-size:100% }
a { background:none ; color:#FF0 }
a:visited { background:none ; color:#AA0 }
h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6 { margin:10px ; padding:0px }
h1 { border-bottom:1px solid #EFEFEF ; font-size:200% ;
text-align:center }
h2 { font-size:130% ; text-align:center }
h3 { font-size:100% ; margin:10px 10px 0px 10px }
p { margin:15px ; padding:0px }

#footer { border-top:1px solid #EFEFEF;
margin:20px 0px 0px 0px ; padding:10px ; text-align:center}
#logoOuter { background:#800 url(images/bg_logo.jpg)
repeat-x ; color:#EFEFEF ; height:170px }
#logoInner { background:url(images/logo.jpg) no-repeat;
color:#EFEFEF; font-weight:bold ; height:170px;
padding:68px 0px 0px 230px ; text-align:right }
#nav { background:#C00 ; border-top:1px solid #EFEFEF;
border-bottom:1px solid #EFEFEF ; border-left:1px solid
#EFEFEF ; color:#EFEFEF ; font-weight:bold ; width:100%}
#nav a { background:#C60 ; color:#EFEFEF ; display:block;
line-height:2em ; padding:0px 5px; text-decoration:none}
#nav a:hover { background:#F60; color:#EFEFEF }
#nav td { border-right:1px solid #EFEFEF; text-align:center;
width:20% }
#nav td a { text-align:center; width:100% }

The only thing different is the last #nav id.

Now back to my work.

Thanks Kalina. I'll play with that more when I get back on Friday - it seems to cause a couple of other issues, but I think I just have to move a couple more style elements from one rule to the new rule.

I'm still puzzled as to why only one link was affected. Ain't it fun racking your brains over stuff like this? :)

Yeah lots of fun, lol. Let me know how it goes.