I also had the same problem with IE7. The design falled over to the left and the css had no effect until I manually reloaded the page. When running my pages trough The W3C Markup Validation Service it said there was a BOM in my files. I resaved the files, but with no luck. Then I checked my xmlrpc.php file, because I am doing almost all my posting from a home made desktop application. I found that if I took out this line:
.setRequestHeader “Charset”, “utf-8”
IE7 displayed my files perfectly.
I am trying to get this beast up and running on a windows server as well. I guess the different folders (date etc) should be created on the fly by WP? It is not happening. Do I have to create them manually? I use this folder structure: /index.php/%year%/%monthnum%/Úy%/%post_id%/