<RANT> Please, if you are using Internet Explorer, make it a priority to stop using it. Download and install Firefox now! Why? Because Internet explorer, even IE7, has so many bugs and non-standard ways of rendering a page that life designing web sites is more complicated than it really ought to be.
Modern sites now are laid out using CSS (Cascading Style Sheets). CSS is a world standard that separates the functionality of a website from the task of presenting pages to the user. This in theory is a good thing, but when the world's most popular browser (for the time being anyway) doesn't adhere to the standard web designers have got a problem. Not only do we have to learn the correct way of doing things, we also require an extensive understanding of the bugs in Internet Explorer and more importantly, how to work round them. IE hacks have become as much a standard in web design as the standards themselves.
Probably the most glaring example; the W3C standard states that the dimensions of a block element (it's width and height) are internal dimensions that do not include the block margin. Someone at Microsoft must have decided that this wasn't the most logical way of doing things (I'll admit they have a point) so IE treats the dimensions of a block as it's overall dimensions including the margins. To get a precise cross browser page layout using CSS therefore requires careful thought.
And another thing: IE6 and in some circumstances IE7 don't natively display the transparency in transparent png format (portable network graphics), so many sites include scripts to hack around this. Some IE hacks actually exploit other bugs in the browser, with the risk that if and when those loopholes are closed the hack stops working and pages display incorrectly.
The list of problems is long. A few minutes Googling and you will find that the internet is littered with sites, blogs and forum posts on the subject - so much so that there is no point in going into more detail here.
What can we do about it? Use another browser. You can't uninstall Internet Explorer unfortunately because it's so tightly integrated into Windows, but you can download, install and use an alternative. I recommend and use Firefox. It's quicker, more secure ( Internet Explorer supports ActiveX controls, a feature specifically designed by Microsoft as a way for a website to install software on your machine, Firefox doesn't support ActiveX controls because they are a nightmare) and Firefox sticks to the standards. </RANT>
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