li:hover in IE for menus without submenus

I try to change the hover background color for IE. Everything works fine for FF and co, but with IE there is a bug. When you have a menu without submenu, the hover background color cannot be set. An imperfect solution is this:

ul.nice-menu li:hover, ul.nice-menu li a:hover {
  background-color:#F92A39
}

This will at least change the background color when hovering over the link, but the non-hover coler it returns as soon as you move away from the link. This is quite ugly.

Until the improved IE7 becomes current, I would appreciate that this small bug gets corrected. Shouldn't the javascript come in here, like it does for menus with submenu? I looked at it and it seems to only come into play with li.parentmenu.