Dropdown menus

I am a big fan of the Swift template. It is fast and looks amazing in Firefox. Unfortunately, the dropdown menus do not seem to be working in IE8. Initially I thought the problem was mine, but I noticed the same problem with the demo site. When I view it in IE8 (both your demo site and my site), the menu displays all the topics vertically. (Also a minor issue: the neat semi-transparent background behind the post titles in the slider is opaque in IE8 as well.) Thank you for any help you can give me!