This is a common problem with Microsoft. The reason why things look bad in IE8 is because IE8 is not compliant with most web standards. The same thing was true when IE4 first came out (which is why Netscape took over the browser market during that time). Microsoft is in the business of creating standards, not following them. Thus, this is what happens. All compatibility mode does is it turns off the ACID functions which causes everything to return to normal. The reason, however, why vShare sites usually take the worst hit is because vShare is not using compliant web code either. If you run a vShare website through a web validator, you get all kinds of errors. However, the only way to fix them in vShare is to have a decrypted version as many of the HTML renderings take place inside of encrypted files.