On Sat, 27 Sep 2008 12:27:43 +0100, Rip van Winkle <rvw@yoohoo.co.uk>
wrote:

>Here's a strange thing which took me hours to track down. I'd have
>thought that 'font-style: italic;' was generally harmless, but
>apparently not to IE7 and/or Vista.
>
>The stripped-down version of the web page is at
>http://www.wessex100.org.uk/index_demo.html and the stylesheet is at
>http://www.wessex100.org.uk/shared/wessex_demo.css . Both validate.
>
>The odd behaviour affects the width of the page displayed and thus the
>placing of the centered background image. Everything works as it
>should with WinXP running Firefox, Opera, Safari and IE6, and with
>Vista running Firefox. It goes wrong with Vista running IE7.
>
>To make the page display correctly in Vista/IE7 I've found I have to
>take out two occurrences of font-style: italic; . The demo version has
>these suppressed, but if you take either of them out where I've
>indicated you'll see the effect. None of the other OS/browser
>combinations I've mentioned are affected.
>
>Is this a known bug, and can anyone explain it?


Just to close this off and for the benefit of anyone Googling this
thread I've loaded a very simple demo of the problem and the
workaround at
http://rnetworks2002.users.btopenwor...alics_demo.zip

The earlier links have been removed.

Thanks again for pointing me in the right direction.