IE8 anchor tag background-color - this one is hurting my brain

These links look exactly how I want them to look in Firefox (v3.5 installed on this machine) but not in IE8 (see below).

Can anyone tell me if this is a known bug?

In IE, everything works except the background-color attribute for a:hover.

If it is set to #ffffff (aka #fff) it does not work.

If I change it to #fefefe (or any other colour, so far as I can tell), it works.

Am I barking mad?


MARKUP:

	<div class="section footerlinks">
	<a href="blog.cfm">Blog</a><br />
	<a href="contact.cfm">Contact</a><br />
	</div>

HTML:

CSS

.footerlinks {
line-height:30px;
}
.footerlinks a:link, .footerlinks a:visited
{
	color: #ffffff; 
	text-decoration:none;
	padding:5px 5px 5px 5px;
}
.footerlinks a:active, .footerlinks a:hover
{
	color: #583684;
	background-color:#fff;
	text-decoration:none;
	padding:5px 5px 5px 5px;
}

HTML:

 

Works fine for me in IE...

 

Thanks AHEINC - not for me, though. What version of IE? I have 8.0.7600.16385 and 8.0.6001.19019 here and it doesn't work in either of them.