CSS Text Input Weirdness

OK – so here is my first tech post, which of course centers around a frustration while creating my pink blog. As usual, I was previewing my code in Mozilla, and my “Comments” page looked very lovely and pink. Then, as usual, I held my breath and previewed my code in IE, and my lovely pink goodness was interrupted by a *yellow* text input!

“Unacceptable!” I said, at approximately midnight one night. So, I searched and I searched to see if I could find a work-around to the problem and came up with nothing. Then, for kicks, I viewed some of my favorite CSS/tech sites (Eric Meyer, Position is Everything, and even my husband’s site) in IE, and indeed, they all had the same issue! At 2:00 a.m., I decided that if Eric Meyer could live with it, then so could I, but I’m definitely not happy about it.

The problem is rather hard to describe, but I’ll give it a shot. As you can see on my “Comments” page, there are multiple text inputs, one for Name, one for E-mail, and one for URI. It seemed at first that a yellow background color was showing up only on subsequent text inputs (as it appears now in IE). I tried rearranging them, and still got the same result: the first text input was the proper gray background, but subsequent text inputs were yellow. Tried putting them in a table, tried separating them with paragraph tags, tried rearranging the label tags – all to no avail. During the process, at some point or another, two of the text inputs showed yellow, while one was always correct, though not always the same one (or in the same order). So my theory that this issue was occurring in subsequent text inputs was inaccurate, as it did occur in other arrangements, with one text input always being correct, while the others were yellow. Anyway, I tried many, many more things – mostly re-ordering the text inputs, adding more inputs to see what happened, isolating or separating with whatever tags I could think of, but still the same general problem: yellow text inputs on a PINK site!

It’s enough to make even a techno-geek Southern woman want to pull out her dyed medium reddish-brown hair!

So to some of you more wise, and with more time on your hands, any ideas what’s up in IE? Any ideas on work-arounds?