Hi, I filed bug #9093 a week ago, regarding disappearing backgrounds in old opera. (It's currently stuck on 'needs review' but seeing as it's closed, it probably won't get reviewed.)

Anyway, same thing happening in IE8, the same cause too: the fix to #9028 is causing the body background to vanish. This seems to occur if you load jquery after the body element has been created.

I couldn't do a jsfiddle, it was running too slow in IE8, so I uploaded a test case here:

http://www.partyark.co.uk/html/jquery.1.6.background-bug.html

AJP