IE8 might be having trouble parsing url(...)no-repeat
with no whitespace separating the two values. See if adding a space there fixes the problem.
It's not clear from any spec if not having whitespace there is valid CSS; although the Jigsaw W3C CSS validator says it's valid, I don't really trust it. It's probably valid since url(...)
and no-repeat
are necessarily two separate tokens according to the grammar, but again, the spec does not spell this out very clearly in prose, so I can't say for sure.
I would strongly recommend having whitespace separating the shorthand values in any case.