User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; en-US; rv:1.8a) Gecko/20040517 Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; en-US; rv:1.8a) Gecko/20040517 css1 attribute vertical-align is ignored for the image inside the button if the image has an "align" attribute, and has a strange placement below the text regardless of the vertical-align value,depending if there is text before of the image. See the example. Correct behaviour is also shown. Reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce:

align="left" floats the image. So it's no longer inline, and vertical alignment doesn't affect its positioning with respect to the line box. Based on your screenshots, it looks like IE just ignores "align" on the image... which would be a bug in IE, no? The fact that having text before the float pushes down the float is bug 50630 *** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 50630 ***