CSS sprite, jQuery fadeIn/fadeOut, transparent PNG, and IE: wtf?

My situation is perhaps one of the most masochistic in which I've ever been.

I have a series of images that fade in and fade out over a period of time using jQuery. They're all transparent PNGs. Because I'm interested in optimizing the speed of my website, I thought it would be convenient if I could throw all of my PNGs in one nice sprite-able PNG file, still retaining the good benefits of transparency along the way.

Of course, IE is the browser that presents a problem: IE8 seems to struggle with rendering PNGs that fade in and out without the use of AlphaImageLoader. The problem with AlphaImageLoader, however, is that it ignores CSS properties like background-position, rendering CSS sprites impossible to render.

Any ideas of fantastical brilliance out there?

(I've considered using the 'clip' CSS开发者_Python百科 property, but no sprite generator out there today currently outputs data using 'clip', and coding it in manually would be a real PITA.)

There are scripts around that help you fix IE pngs issues. Here is one that i used in the past.

IE PNG FIX