Really confusing ie css problems (go figure HA!)

Ok guys, I hope you can help me out, I've been reading every site about IE hacks I could find and I can't find this specific problem... On my site I have a your standard menu bar that uses css sprites, when I roll over them they show their alternate position no problem, but the div below them kicks down to reveal a lot of white and it stays like that.

The second problem I have is that my content div has an image that I am using as the background; so I am using absolute pixels to style the site as it also has graphic borders in 2 seperate divs. the problem is that the content div is pushed to the bottom of the divs that are on either side of it, leaving just a white area where the image is supposed to be, and the graphic starts at the bottom.

http://croedesign.com/DFG/rebate/ - that's what I'm working on right now, stripped of content

http://croedesign.com/DFG/rebate_backup/ - that's with the content and everything working in opera,firefox and safari

the CSS fie is
http://croedesign.com/DFG/rebate/assets/css/screen.css

any help would be greatly appreciated!!!

Thanks so much in advance!

 

I would suggest to recode the whole layout, doesn't seem hard anyway.

 

Sorry, but your response wasn't helpful in the least, if I redo it I'm sure I would make the same mistake with the css styles that I have done originally. So why not just fix the ie mistakes?

 

The problem is that you have "stuff" in front of the doctype. Any "stuff" puts IE into quirks mode. Remove that first line and everything in front of the doctype to fix IE as far as that goes.

 

Thank you sir, that indeed fixed most of my issues. Now I've just got a small gap between my floated divs that I'm trying to fight. Ie6 only. (should I even still target ie6?) ie8 has it all kinds of jacked up, but by forcing it into ie7 render mode it looks fine, I don't like that solution but frankly I've spent twice as much time trying to get this site looking decent for IE than I spent just getting firefox, safari and opera looking nice.

 

Typical. I spend 10% to 30% of my customer's billable hours trying to get things working in IE AFTER everything works in every other browser. And people question why I say ALL versions of IE are the worst on the planet.