Yes that's right! The :hover style normally only works with <a> tags in IE while it should work for any other element as well. Other browsers like FireFox did a better job supporting this but since the majority is using IE we're stuck with a broken :hover implementation.
There is a cure however. A pretty smart piece of javascript by Peter Nederlof fixes this particular problem very elegant. He created a behavior for IE which can read your stylesheets and attach onmouseover and onmouseout events to the HTML elements that needs them to enable the :hover effect.
To enable the :hover style for almost any element in IE, all you would have to do is to attach the behaviour the the body element in your stylesheet like this:
body
{
behavior: url(javascript/csshover.htc);
}
For a full explanation and the behavior code turn to Peter Nederlof's site: Whatever:hover
This is a real Gem!