Here's a couple tricks I use to help with CSS:

1) I try to avoid using padding as much as possible as IE seems to have problems with it plus it messes up the width/height of block elements. Try to replace padding with margin as much as you can.

2) For IE, if you have IE 7 or IE 8 hit F12 to open up the Developer Toolbar. This is their version of Firebug. It will allow you to inspect elements and make changes to the page directly rather than saving the changes in your editor and then reloading.

Edit - actually after checking out the images you attached, I realised I had this same problem on another project I worked on. I will try to remember to have a look at what I did and let you know if you still need help. I think it had something to do with setting the outer <div> to relative.