What would cause this behavior in only one person's IE8?

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The backgrounds in question are drawn with a single-pixel, xy-repeated, semitransparent PNG.

This person's IE8 is drawing this as a gradient that starts at the top left corner and becomes more transparent to the right and below.

I am unable to reproduce this problem in IE8/WinXP/VMwareFusion/SnowLeopard. Also cannot reproduce with IE7 (IE8 in compatibility mode). Also cannot reproduce with IE6 or any other browser.

we are running the same version -- only the product IDs are different.

I confirmed at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Explorer_8#Release_history that 18702 is a final release version of IE8.

Even tho I did not think it would help, I asked for a list of addons in IE8 -- nothing unusual.

What could be causing this problem for just this one person? The person mentioned that it is a work computer and the IT people are really strict about things. Coul开发者_开发问答d any workplace restrictions cause this weird behavior? Could it be a graphics driver issue?

Again, I know this is not an IE8 problem because I have IE8 and cannot reproduce it.

I want to know how might one alter IE8 -- perhaps for security reasons -- so that this behavior is seen? Or, what would cause one specific computer to display things this way?

I have encountered this problem before and the only solution I found is not to use a 1x1 pixel image. Try 1x10 it should fix it.

Are any files (graphics, js, css) being pulled from a server that might be blocked by their office firewall?

I've had this happen, where just one graphic was from some off-limits site, with bizarre results.

My guess is that you're using jQuery, and this bug will pop-up on mouseover for random IE7 and IE8 users. I found one possible fix in a www.farmcode.org blog post:

Wrap the body of your page with the following conditional:

<!--[if IE]><div id="ieWrap"><![endif]—>

(the rest of the page html goes here)

<!--[if IE]></div><![endif]—> 

and add the following CSS for IE:

#ieWrap .productView .productThumbnail a
{        
  background-image: none;        
  filter: progid:DXImageTransform.Microsoft.AlphaImageLoader
                 (src='grey_overlay.png',sizingMethod='scale');
  width:100%;
}

You'll need to change the CSS to match your situation, but this should get you started.