This was a little fustrating to find, but for those of you who are applying a background-color attribute to your table tr's and td's and are not seeing the color appear in IE7 or lower, check your reset.css. If you reset.css has 'tr:background:transparent' applied to it, your color will not show even with the '!important' tag. Check the very top of your reset.css. Usually the tr is lumped together with all default html tags so its easy to miss.