IE8 Text issue for Article

For circle open template_css.css and find this:

#content_gradient .bottom .custom_buttons li:last-child {
background: url(../images/circle.png) no-repeat right 7px;
}

then change it to:

#content_gradient .bottom .custom_buttons li:last-child {
background: url(../images/circle.png) no-repeat 100% 7px;
}

for your first question I can not reproduce that.

The first item was an error but I was able to fix it by formatting the text on the article... strange thing...

on the circle thing - I just removed both the CSS items... as the fix you recommended didnt work how I wanted it to - no worries...

One thing I forgot to mention... when you first go to the site... you can see the images preload real quick... almost like flashing or stacking up or something... it has been doing this from minute 1... happens in IE and firefox... so - when you go to the site... you can see a bunch of the pics for the Hot Effects Rotator kind of flash real quick as they preload... then the rotator works as its supposed too... flash isnt the right word but you will see when you go check it out. FYI - I have all the standard setting that the hot install had... different images but it did it with the default images too.

You mean images are shown one-by-one without animation before module gets initialized completely.

You can solve that by adding this to end of template_css.css:

#slider img{
display:none;
}