There is a compatibility issue with IE8 and Publisher 2003 and 2007. Any
design elements that are 'grouped' together, which includes the Publisher
wizard built navbars, do not render when you view the web page in IE8 . The
fix in general is to ungroup the elements. There is both a manual fix to
these issues and a Service Patch that has been issued to fix it for Pub
2007.
Reference: Navigation bars and other content is missing from Publisher HTML
output in Internet Explorer 8:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/969705
A manual method of fixing this grouping issue:
Prior to uploading your pages find all text boxes and other design elements
that are grouped together and ungroup. You can save those changes to your
publication. Then make a copy of your publication by doing a 'File > Save
As' and in this copy go to each page > Edit > Select All > Arrange >
Ungroup. This will ungroup the Publisher built navbar and disconnect it from
the wizard, and the navbars will render correctly in IE8. 'Publish to the
Web' from this copy of your publication. When you want to make further
changes in your web, go back to the original Publisher file, make the
corrections there, save your changes, and again make a copy, ungroup the
navbars and produce new web files for uploading. The advantage of this
workflow is that you will not have to rebuild the navbar if you choose to
add a page to the navbar. If you do not need to add a page or section to
your site, you can leave the navbar ungrouped and skip the step of saving a
copy.
Publisher 2007 can be fixed manually or with the Office 2007 SP2:
Reference: Description of 2007 Microsoft Office Suite Service Pack 2 (SP2)
and of Microsoft Office Language Pack 2007 SP2:
http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=953195
Some users have found SP2 breaks Publisher, and makes it impossible to open
existing Pub files...you know, break one thing to fix another, so there is a
hotfix for that:
Description of the Publisher 2007 hotfix package (Publisher.msp): June 30,
2009
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/972566/