I have spent a full day getting this template to work with IE8. My best advice is disable everything that is not really really necessary.
In my case I finally had to disable the front page template and only use the inner one. This is a lot less beautiful. I was suffering the redirect to home page error reported elsewhere in the forum for vm users.
The product scroller module didn't show text properly without override CSS.
I would love to hear from anyone who fixed the return to front page problem without switching to just the 'inner' template.
Robert -
www.singlestep.info