Try the latest version. Much better than IE. Now that Microsoft has admitted breaking other browsers, the rendering issues should go down, one hopes. I suspect they also built it into the web creation tools so that other sites also did not conform to the international standards but worked with IE.
To the extent I've used it so far, VS.NET creates pretty compatible code, but to do things that are in the standards that IE doesn't understand, you have to write it yourself. FrontPage used to work pretty much only with IE, but it is a bit better now, although things still work best with IE.
But in this case, Microsoft detected the Opera browser and purposely sent bad code to it, such as the page having a -30 pixel right margin. The site rendered perfectly when Opera was set to spoof the IE6 headers.