Skinr not functioning over the Internet but does work on the localhost

I have a Drupal 7 install with 2 sites configured, the first with Fusion+Acquia Marina, the second with Bartik as the themes. The behaviour I see is as follows:

If I connect on the server from Firefox, Chrome or Opera using the url http://simcoenorthconservative.localhost/, then everything displays correctly.
With IE8, the initial display doesn't see the CSS and the blocks display left justified in a column, but once I login as an authenticated user IE displays http://simcoenorthconservative.localhost/ correctly as well.

From the same machine if I connect with FF or Chrome to www.simcoenorthconservative.ca (which means I'm going out to at least the public interface of my router and back in) then both display correctly but Opera and IE8 display without the CSS again.

Finally, if I connect to the site from the hotel room I'm in now (yes, I'm working on vacation) then all browsers display the IE8 behaviour. Strangely when I log in to a connection at www.simcoenorthconservative.ca it then tries to launch http://simcoenorthconservative.localhost/node
which of course won't work on the net :-(

I'm very new to Drupal but it seems this must somehow be related to the rewriting of URL's.

My sites.php file entries are:

$sites['www.simcoenorthconservative.ca'] = 'simcoenorthconservative.localhost';
$sites['www.watsongrouphomes.ca'] = 'watsongrouphomes.ca.localhost';
# $sites['localhost.example'] = 'example.com';

My vhost.conf entries are:

ServerName localhost
DocumentRoot "D:\Websites"

Options Indexes FollowSymLinks
AllowOverride All
Order allow,deny
Allow from all

ServerName simcoenorthconservative.localhost
ServerAlias www.simcoenorthconservative.ca
ServerAlias www.simcoenorthconservatives.ca
ServerAlias www.simcoenorthconservative.com
ServerAlias www.simcoenorthconservatives.com
ServerAlias simcoenorthconservative.ca
ServerAlias simcoenorthconservatives.ca
ServerAlias simcoenorthconservative.com
ServerAlias simcoenorthconservatives.com
ServerAlias 192.168.99.4/simcoenorthconservative
DocumentRoot "D:\Websites"

Options Indexes FollowSymLinks
AllowOverride All
Order allow,deny
Allow from all

ServerName watsongrouphomes.ca.localhost
ServerAlias www.watsongrouphomes.ca
ServerAlias www.watsongrouphomes.com
ServerAlias 192.168.99.4/watsongrouphomes
DocumentRoot "D:\Websites"

Options Indexes FollowSymLinks
AllowOverride All
Order allow,deny
Allow from all

.htaccess is the default from D7

The D7 modules are all the most recent stable releases. The platform is Win2003/Apache/MySQL/Acquia Dev Desktop.

I have the following performance settings:
Cache pages for anonymous users - on
Cache blocks - on
Compress cached pages -off
Aggregate & compress CSS files - on
Aggregate javascript files -on
JQuery compression level - production
JQuery CDN - none

(FWIW I've tried toggling all of these to different settings)

PHP version is 5.3.9

The key modules installed are:

Fusion accelerator, jquery update, skin, skinr with all components turned on

If you would like to see the sites they are at www.simcoenorthconservative.ca and www.watsongrouphomes.ca. On the first I've created a temporary account if you want to log in:
userid: guest
pw: guest-user

Thanks for any insights

Kirk