Older version of IE? which specifically? IE6? If so I’m afraid you’ll be out of luck or at least search long and hard to find themes that work with IE6 they should! but most won’t have taken this older browser into account bp-default hasn’t – by the look of things – done any or much testing in IE6.
There may be a few of the better ‘Premium’ themes around that have done their duty by browsers, but be prepared that if you really want layouts working in IE6 you might have to get someone to do that for you specifically.
Yup – it’s version 6! We have it at my work … it’s hard to believe but we do! Hopefully most other people don’t have this version, just the slow company I work for. I don’t want to pay for a theme b/c it’s just for our PTA (non-profit school organization).
No it’s not hard to believe, many organizations still use IE6 and can’t change as they have proprietary in house apps written for it. I’m afraid the truth is that too many younger coders and not so younger are are happy to assume that IE6/7 is dead and they don’t need to code with correct and proper cross browser checks or probably know how to do that. The approach now with IE8 is out should be to ensure that there is at the least a presentable layout that functions at a basic level albeit without the bells and whistles, sadly this appears to be not the case and work will have to be done in addition . There are few themes around for BP personally I don’t have experience of many to any great degree, and there are a few from a certain premium outfit that I was non too impressed by. You might find better themes at http://buddydev.com/ but if you take any specifically ask whether they are checked to work in IE6
The bp-default theme does not look cosmetically good in IE6. Some CSS rules are using newer ones that IE6 just doesn’t support.
Also, the BP admin bar will be displayed in the footer instead of being fixed at the top.
However, most of the functionality should work.
You could try installing IE7-JS:
http://code.google.com/p/ie7-js/
It attempts to fix many of the HTML and CSS issues that IE6 has.
‘Attempts’ being the operative word.
it’s a shame as all that’s really required is a little knowledge and experience, IE issues are not really that hard to cope with, the use of combinator selectors that IE6 doesn’t understand is just plain wrong and unnecessary, and generally only used where rulesets were desired to be hidden from IE or where the ruleset simply added fluff and wasn’t vital for layout purposes.
Someone!? – yes probably end up being me 
– will need to produce a Conditional Comment stylesheet [if lte IE 7] to provide support for bp-default and our old ailing fiend IE6/7 that can be packaged with the BP install.
That would be sweet if you could do that, hnla!
Yep I’ve added it to a ever growing to do list, not sure when I’ll be able to get round to it but definitely will at some point as it’s a shame that bp-default doesn’t render well on IE >= 7
