jQuery Cycle has a bug in IE 7 and 8 where a white background is added to cycle elements. That will override background images. If your cycle object has a background image and you use the cleartype fix, the background won't show. Cycle has a property 'cleartypeNoBg' to address this issue. Set the property to true.

$('.mycycleclass')
  .cycle({ 
    fx:  'scrollHorz',
    cleartype:  true,
    cleartypeNoBg:  true,
});

More info