hasLayout problems after all these years

Having terrible trouble with all version of IE trying to get some peekaboo text to stay put. In this scenario a div was not paying ball at all, after setting hasLayout on pretty much every element in the entire page I realised that the system was outputting HTML without a DTD, dogh, I feel like i've just called tech support to complain about not being able to print, only to find out that the cleaner unplugged the printer.

Note to self, always check the most obvious thing first!

In IE7 I have a normal input type = button which as the behaviour that when you scroll the text in the button gets visually corrupted. So very slowly scrolling the button into view will wipe the text and the button will appear empty. The offending button is fine in IE6 and IE8, I was tempted to ignore this and mark it down as a bug in the browser but weakened and decided to fix it.

After tinkering with the CSS for a while I couldn't find any hack/fix for this issue, setting the writing-mode style to top to bottom, did fix it but didn't think having the button text written out vertically would go down well!

In the end....

window.attachEvent ('onscroll', function(){
 // layout fix for IE7 disappearing text, element has layout so resorting to this madness!
 document.getElementById('buttonMoreSections').style.backgroundColor=(document.documentElement.scrollTop % 2)? '#fff':'white';
})

total MADNESS !

• More about hasLayout