Galleria breaks styles in IE8

I have had great success with galleria d6-1.0 on the website I am developing and it looks great on chrome, safari, ff, etc... but if I keep the module active and access the node within which it is to load using Internet Explorer (mainly 8, for now) - it breaks the styles of that page.

I see some wordpress people having the same issues:
http://wordpress.org/support/topic/photo-galleria-are-messing-up-styles-...

I just removed nearly everything between the body tags except for $content and $closure.

while looking at the two pages on a pc and a mac side by side to test between browsers, the code looks identical as far as basic source code from the page, however IE seems to omit some styles for my thumbnails and the gallery altogether. It's almost as if it's halting during Jscript loading for galleria and it never ends up loading the rest of the CSS for some reason. all the list styles, all the menu styles, even the styles for things that don't include galleria seem to be removed... so something is halting the load... and if IE8 had a console as good as Firefox did I would probably be able to figure this out on my own...

has anyone experienced a similar issue? I'm moving towards integrating galleria manually like i have for another website if I can't figure this out- but I've configured it so well for these other browsers that it would be a waste of all my hard work :-(

opinions/comments/experience?