Status portlets on home page don't render right in IE

I'm talking about the red/green bar in the portlets on the home page. See my screenshots. In Firefox, they look fine, but in IE, the colors are shades of blue and the bar itself is rendered too large.

By tweaking the html itself, I know what causes the colors. There is extra whitespace in the bgcolor tag (inside the quotes), and IE is botching the rendering. I don't know what's causing the size problem.