Oh IE, how I hate thee

Now that I have a little work again, I am immediately confronted once more with the nightmare that is Microsoft Internet Explorer. Right now I'm struggling with a website that looks fine in Firefox, Chrome and Safari, but gets stuffed up in three different ways by IE. In IE7 there are gaps between images everywhere, in IE8 there is a huge space right over the top menu, and in the same IE8 but now in "compatibility mode" (which artificially re-introduces some of the bugs of IE7, but not all of them and not in quite the same way) things break in a different manner still. While I think one can get away with ignoring IE6 by now (mad dogs and Englishmen not withstanding) my biggest concern is IE9, which will only run on Windows Vista and Windows 7, both of which I have no intention of installing on any of my systems ever if I can possibly help it.

So. The old nightmare is once again compounded by an ongoing proliferation of IE versions, none of which have the same bugs but all of which have their own quirks in plenty, which not only requires testing of each web page in all versions of IE and cumbersomely working around the many quirks and brain damage in that particular version, but also often necessitates different versions of style sheets, scripting and what not for each version! And of course you cannot run multiple version of IE (at least not as proper, "clean" installs) on the same system - unless you're willing to put up with multiple Windows versions in separate Virtual Machines, which sucks more than any vacuum ever abhorred by Nature.

Aargh.