After months of research, all nighters and torture I have finally found the Ultimate IE Workaround. The most surprising thing is that I only needed one little META tag and IE behaves. All of a sudden it reads my CSS like a modern browser and even displays 24bit transparent PNGs. Obviously the world wanted me to share this, so, sorry for having to do this, but here it is - "The Ultimate, No Hacks, IE Workaround":

meta name="author" content="chuck norris "