CSS Flash of Unstyled Content
While continuing the Drupal Experiment and trying out various nice themes, I ran into a bit of a problem with some themes appearing for an instant in a very basic and unstyled format before the CSS kicks in and lays out the page the way it's meant to be shown.
After some trial and error, these problems manifested itself across various themes and across various theme engines in Drupal, so the initial suspicion that PHPTemplate might be at fault proved to be wrong.
It appears this is a bug (surely the only one) in Microsoft's Internet Explorer in relation to CSS. More discussion on the so-called Flash of Unstyled Content can be found at BlueRobot.
The workaround fix was to put the following inside the theme <HEAD> tag:
<script type="text/javascript"> </script>
This goes in the page.tpl.php file in the theme folder. Don't ask me why this works.
There is probably a much better and proper fix that should go in the theme engine code, but it'll do for now.