Identical files from different servers. Why might IE 8 display them differently?

I'm working on a site that will go on my company's intranet. I developed it locally on my computer, checking it in different browsers and on colleague's computers, and when it was done I handed it off to IT. They put identical copies on a staging server, and on the production server. This is a site built only with html, javascript, and css. No server side scripting. It also uses a DWF viewer plugin from Autodesk. It is a single standalone page (not part of a CMS) that allows users to load drawings into the viewer and then click to see info from a database of space info saved in a series of js arrays (the space DB software spits out a js file with all the info listed in array literals, creating a crap 开发者_Python百科ton of global variables - ugh, but I digress).

When I followed their links (using IE 8) the version on the staging server looked as expected, but the layout is hosed on the version from the production server. Specifically, it seems like a div that is supposed to flow to the right of a div that is float: left is displaying below the floated div at full width, as though it was clear: left (which it is not). It also has the wrong height.

I downloaded the files from each and they are identical to my local version. Frustrated, I cleared my browser's cache, restarted my computer, checked it on a colleague's computer who also has IE 8. All the same issue. Staging server good. Production server bad.

Finally I uninstalled IE 8 and looked at it in IE 6. Both versions looked fine.

So, to recap. Two different servers. No server side scripting. Identical files. One browser agrees they are identical, the other does not. What could cause this?

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Have you checked that IE8 isn't rendering it in compatibility view (IE7 rendering)? By default IE8 renders things in the "Intranet Zone" in compatibility view with everything else in normal mode.

You can change the mode with the little broken page button to the right of the URL bar.

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Apart from the compatibility setting, other things that could differ from computer to computer for an identical page:

• Font size. Windows allows system-wide font resizing, impacting layouts. It could account for the second div falling underneath the first one.

• Resolution. Could it be a resolution issue? Could also account for the div problem.