Smooth ticker in IE8...impossible?

Let me explain my scenario.

I have a web page generated with PHP which has a lot of divs with rollover effects. It represents a table with more than 200 cells, but is made of divs instead of a table because I've read they are more efficient (specially in IE8 which has turn out my nightmare in this project!)

In the same page I want to put a ticker for user messages with horizontal text scrolling. I have tried to implement the ticker in different ways: pure Javascript or with jquery pluggins:

http://remysharp.com/2008/09/10/the-silky-smooth-marquee/

Well, the thing is that the ticker works great when the page loads, but as soon as the user starts to move the cursor over the table (rollover effects are tri开发者_运维问答ggered) the ticker becomes very jerky in IE8 (Firefox works almost perfect)

After a lot of work tunning my PHP/HTML code I gave up and decided to embed a flash object for the ticker in order to relieve the browser part of the scripting and delegate it to flash. My surprise was that it had the same defect. I am not an expert in how the browser deals with flash objects but I really though it would be a solution.

I've found a example which illustrate the problem.

http://activeden.net/item/xml-news-ticker/7911?red...tudio&clickthrough_id=23795538

This a page with a commercial flash object. It's really much more than what I need, but if you try (with IE8) to move the cursor around the right section of the page, over the elements with rollover effects, you'll notice that the ticker becomes less smooth. Imagine that within a page with 200 divs!

Well my question here is: Is there anything I can do to make this design work as expected (ticker and rollover effects working simultaneously)? I would prefer acomplish this with javascript/jquery but I wont renounce to flash if it's the solution (it doesn't seem so)

By the way, I have tried to achieve this with a java applet and the result is that it works perfectly. Anyway I only considerer this as the last option because I want to avoid the inconvenients of using this technology.

Thanks a lot!

Toni

just to let you know if you have no still resolved the problem check out the jQuery WebTicker it should be a relatively easy implementation. It is compatible with all major browsers including IE8. Cannot confirm performance 100% since I do not have IE8 on this machine but it has been found good enough to be used on some important Financial Websites; its pretty lightweight in itself and saves up a lot of memory and flash usage.