It's absolutely not worth the hassle to me to perform slicing kludges. It should just work the way I mentioned regarding icons with transparency. It's more important now than ever with layered style sheets.

Today I'm left fixing some incompatibilities with IE for both this Stag site as well as my own site. A couple of issues I've found were entirely my fault (not specifying image sizes while working with PNGHack causes them to disappear in IE). But I've found some that have obviously come up since the last time I did any serious testing with IE.