As you already know Internet Explorer takes great care to interpret HTML and CSS in it’s own special way and only sometimes does this co-incide with the W3C’s specification. The padding on Submit Buttons is one such nuisance.
Simply, IE simply ingores any horizontal padding you specify with css. The solution, I discovered, it to use the “overflow: visible” for all such elements e.g.
Before
<input type="submit" value="Internet explorer ignores my padding" style="padding: 20px;" />
After:
<input type="submit" value="Internet explorer respects my padding" style="padding: 20px; overflow: visible;" />
NB For this example I’ve put the style inline with the html - for real use this should be separated from the html in an external style sheet.

Thank you for this solution.
It works very well on IE 6 and 7
Thanks so much - I have been looking for this for AGES!
Thanks again.
Thank you so much for putting this out here. I have been looking for a solution to this problem for a current project at work. This works perfectly.