I recently had to create a site for an education facility, and they turn on Compatibility mode for all their networked PCs, for legacy support.

This was messing around with some of my JS/CSS functionality, so I needed a work around.

3 options really:

1. Get the IT manager to remove the global compatibility layer and only apply to the legacy apps. Not going to happen!
2. Rewrite the code to use IE friendly techniques. Possible but a ball ache.
3. Force the browser to not use compatibility mode. Sounds best, right?

So, its really very simple, in the head section of the page:

<meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="IE=edge" />

That worked an absolute treat.