I running a modified version of the Gulf Coasting theme in which all I really done was change the header picture and removed the footer picture and made some changes to the color. Below is a screen shot of how it looks on my machine.  I went to Kevin Harder’s site and could see no issues there; could this be the Ustream and FriendFeed widget causing this? It does better when I emulate IE7 though there is no footer.

CSS Expressions are no longer supported in Internet Explorer 8 Standards Mode

loadTOCNode(3, 'moreinformation'); Also known as 'Dynamic Properties', CSS expressions are a proprietary extension to CSS with a high performance cost. As of Internet Explorer 8 Beta 2, CSS expressions are not supported in IE8 standards mode. They are still supported in IE7 Strict mode and Quirks mode for backward compatibility.

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/949787

To make this theme work in IE8 beta 2 go to tools and click on "Compatibility View"

you can also make this always work by adding:
<meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="IE=EmulateIE7" />

to layout.view (for some reason adding this to Graffiti's site options head section does not enable it)