I had the same troubles here. Firefox is my primary browser for development, and IE then has to be tuned (don't you just love the fact that Microsoft don't make W3C compliant products?) so, adeptdesigns, I know exactly what you mean.
I found the simplest solution was to add a specific style to my template for 'legend' tags. The Hikashop html uses 'Legend' to identify the fieldset titles during checkout, and it seems IE wants to render Legends in its own unique way unless prompted otherwise. So I prompted it otherwise by adding the following to my CSS:
legend {
color: #FFFFFF;
}
Simple and (almost) painless. Hope it's of use.