IE7 / IE8 Compatibility View: Element on page shifts to correct position when ANY css changes

I have an extremely strange problem in IE that I can't seem to track down. I have two boxes, both floated left, with a margin-left on the right box to give some spacing between the two. In Firefox (of course), it all displays correctly, but in IE when the page is first loaded, the boxes have no separation (no margin).

Here's the crazy part. If ANY CSS changes on the page at all, the box magically jumps to the correct position. And when I say any, I mean any. I modified the final font name of 3 in the font-family list of the body tag,开发者_运维知识库 and the box shifted to the correct position (this wasn't a change that would even modify the look of anything on the page).

I could post my HTML and CSS on the page, but it's fairly routine. I just wondered if anyone had come across or heard of this problem in the past? Incidentally, IE8 seems to render it fine.

Thanks.

Follow-Up: So I was able to at least patch the problem by floating the box on the right to the right, and removing its margin-left property. Because my container div is just wide enough to accommodate the two boxes, this works for my situation, but it wouldn't be nearly as nice if the two boxes weren't contained so tightly in their container div.

Older versions of IE can be pretty buggy about how they handle floats. Try defining a width on your floated elements. This will help make the layout more explicit (so harder for IE to misunderstand) and trigger hasLayout if you haven't already (a weird internal IE property that causes a lot of layout bugs).