This is a strange problem - in the following jsFiddle, jQuery returns 0px for a cell's padding, when using IE7 or IE8, which is correct:
However, when I test this locally in a simple HTML page in IE7 or IE8 (code below), jQuery tells me the padding is 1px. Can anyone see why this is happening? The code is the same as in jsFiddle, unless I'm missing something?
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
<html>
<head>
<script src="jquery-1.8.1.min.js" type="text/javascript"></script>
<script>
$(document).ready(function() {
alert($("td").css("padding-left"));
});
</script>
</head>
<body>
<table cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0" border="0" width="400">
<tr><td>some text</td></tr>
</table>
</body>
</html>