IE transparency and font rendering

While design­ing a web­site, I wanted to add some semi-transparent back­grounds using CSS rgba.
In this arti­cle, the author sug­gests using a PNG as a fall­back for browsers that don’t sup­port the rgba dec­la­ra­tion.
Hav­ing read about Inter­net Explorer’s pro­pri­etary fil­ters, I decided to use that instead, to avoid hav­ing to down­load another image.
I added the fol­low­ing dec­la­ra­tions to the IE stylesheet with con­di­tional comments:

.content, #primary {
       background:transparent;

     filter: progid:DXImageTransform.Microsoft.gradient(startColorstr=#80ebe7e7,endColorstr=#80ebe7e7);

	}

.page-title, .singular-page-title {
	       background:transparent;

                  filter: progid:DXImageTransform.Microsoft.gradient(startColorstr=#80146ea4,endColorstr=#80146ea4);
}

This is the result:

You can see that the result is not very pretty! The font doesn’t seem to ren­der very well.

I sus­pected that the IE fil­ters were the cul­prit, so I removed the dec­la­ra­tions, and here is the result:

Much bet­ter!

Con­clu­sion: I’ll use the PNG fall­back method.

Have you expe­ri­enced this issue? Is there a fix?
Leave your comments!