Its not a commercial project, just an alternate (lightweight) front end for a forum and I wanted to prove to myself that old versions of IE weren't as bad to develop for as I remember.

The truth ended up being somewhere in the middle, I was reminded of rendering errors that I had long forgotten, but all in all it wasn't as bad as I thought it would be. It helps that I'm just building a website in the classic sense, not a blob of JavaScript that happens to puke out HTML, and when I run into something that's awkward to implement I can just adjust the design to work with what I have.

I realise that's not something a lot of people in a commercial job would have had the luxury of doing.