IE style of primary menu with nice menus and drop down

I am trying to get my primary menu to work in the Garland fixed width (Minelli) theme. I have enabled nice menus in order to have drop down menus but am still having trouble with two aspects (have attached a jpg image to show the issues):

1. The primary links in nice menus works perfectly well in Firefox but not IE6. With IE6 I don't seem to be able to override the general a:link style in style.css with the style I want for my nice menus primary menu (I am using a custom css file to make changes to nice menus). Specifically, I just want to change the font color (see attached image to see item "A" - it should be white as in the Firefox screenshot). Other style elements can be overridden easily enough with IE6, such as a:hover and a:active but not a:link or a. The really strange thing is that sometimes one of the list items will randomly be white (see items "B" and "C")!!! Can't figure it out at all!!

2. Is there a way in the nice menus css file to style the background color of just the menu children? (see item "D") I would like to have the "Case Studies" on hover to show the whole box white but the only element that I can play with to make it so will actually affect all of the parent items too - which I don't want to do.

I hope all of the above makes some sense. I would really appreciate any input.