'Fun' with CSS

For further fun I have been aiming at horizontal (only) scrolling, for the purposes of displaying code samples. Taking a previous post; it overflows correctly in Chrome and Firefox but fails to do so in Internet Explorer 8, and I presume earlier versions. Worse - or to make it more convoluted - I can specify exact width, extract the CSS and the HTML and have it working in IE8, but the same code still fails within the context of Blogger. I’ll trace the cause eventually (and use the <pre> tag rather than a <div>) yet it’s possibly a little obsessive; in all my posts I’ve only displayed code twice, and only once has it required scrolling.