really strange IE8 font behaviour that I'd lik

Question

I've got a really strange thing here. I'll start at the top.

In a specific, rather complicated div setup that I've got for my site, IE8 does a really strange thing with the font: it actually appears to thin it down. It does this with any font that is used in that div. I actually can't even isolate where it's coming from! It's really strange. IE9 doesn't do it. FF doesn't do it. Chrome doesn't do it. I just get this strange thing happening in IE8 in this div. See the attached image, and you'll see that the font in the white section is thinner than the font in the gray section even though they have the same styling. I've shown three examples, one with Verdana and one with Arial, and, as you can see, IE8 shows this strange behaviour with both fonts. And then the third one, the bottom one, is how Chrome renders the page.

Now here's where it gets really strange. I actually like what IE8 does here! Because of whatever IE8 glitch this is, it almost creates a new font, a really slimmed down version which I like, especially with Verdana.

So, here's my question. Have any of you come across this behaviour before and is there any way to duplicate it cross-browser? All other browsers except IE8 just render regular Verdana or Arial in the gray section. Only IE8 seems to render this pared down version. Is there anything I can do to make that the default for my site? I've tried font-weight, but it definitely isn't that. The font that you see in the gray area of the attachment is the normal font weight; there's no thinner weight than that. The font weight in the white section is a serendipitous IE8 glitch, I guess, that I'd like to duplicate somehow. Any ideas?

Thanks.