SOLVED: Can anyone help me with missing IE8 background colors and images?

[marahmarie]

Update/tl;dr style: IE8 seems to have a bug wherein converting longhand image CSS to shorthand makes background images disappear.

Update 2/tl;dr style 4-26-14: IE8 seems to have not exactly a bug, but rather a syntax issue which most modern browsers (including later versions of IE itself) don't have; for example, background:#f3f4ee url(http://intoolate.files.wordpress.com/2010/12/bkg.jpg) repeat-y center will work; meanwhile, background:#f3f4ee url(http://intoolate.files.wordpress.com/2010/12/bkg.jpg) center repeat-y and background:#f3f4ee url(http://intoolate.files.wordpress.com/2010/12/bkg.jpg)repeat-y center will not work. Confirmed with a little A-B testing after writing this, so it's solved. Leaving the post up in case it helps anyone else with a similar issue.

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Hi again, folks; I've been trying to redo my CSS to make it more condensed (by using CSS shorthand and trying to get rid of unnecessary code) but ran into a problem while doing so with IE8. Before I started this my CSS was not displaying correctly in IE8 (most images were aligning wrong, so most of the page appeared "broken") but now some background colors and all images, every last one, just won't show up at all.

I come bearing screen shots for those who are not IE8-enabled (and my IE8 is running on XP; I understand Vista and Win7 might display my CSS differently in the same version of IE but at the moment I don't have access to any machines running those): As seen on my XP computer in IE8: http://i.imgur.com/ePKRRzv.jpg
As seen on IE Net Renderer (@ http://netrenderer.com/index.php): http://i.imgur.com/DFLECRD.jpg

I'm suspecting when I changed my image CSS from background-image: url(); background-position: px px to background: #color url() px px; (used the shorthand version, in other words) that that's what made all my background images disappear but that wouldn't explain why the background colors on the header and footer, for instance, won't display now, either. Unless it would explain it. Color me fifty shades of confused. :/

Can anyone help me figure out what's causing this? If my hunch is right (that my image shorthand is at fault, throwing some kind of bug in IE that causes background-related things to not show up at all) (ETA: my hunch was right, just confirmed it by reverting to longhand CSS on the header image) I might just leave things as they are because going for longhand CSS on images again will may bloat my CSS dramatically (ETA: but if I can get images to play nice in IE this time I just may do it). If there's another reason for missing background colors and images, though, can anyone help me find and fix it? (ETA: there isn't) Thanks to all. :)