Welcome to the club. This was driving me crazy. I have a table with buttons in the last column. When you hover over a row, the background changes. If you hover over the button in the row, the text color on the button changes as well as the row background. I had 0 padding on the buttons. All this works great in FF with no problems.

In IE8, a whole nuther story. The row hover worked great but when you hovered over the button in the row, nothing happened. The row background didn't change and the button text color didn't change (99.99% of the time).

I played with this and finally realized what was going on. It seems to be that hover doesn't work while over button text. I added 20px of padding on each side of the text on the button. If I slide my cursor down the buttons in the padded area (not touching the text) it worked as well as FF. As soon as I slide the cursor down the middle of the buttons (through the button text), it breaks.

Go figure. I HATE IE!!!!