That symbol is supposed to be aligned with the text of the node having children nodes.
It works correctly in Chrome. However, in IE 8 on a XP box the symbol is always one line above the node’s text.
It behaves this way on any applicable node regardless of it’s position in the tree’s hierarchy.
Another pecularity is that I always get this JS error reported by IE:
Webpage error details
User Agent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 8.0; Windows NT 5.1; Trident/4.0; .NET CLR 1.1.4322; .NET CLR 2.0.50727; .NET CLR 3.0.4506.2152; .NET CLR 3.5.30729)
Timestamp: Mon, 17 Sep 2012 14:58:43 UTC
Message: Syntax error
Line: 1
Char: 1
Code: 0
URI: http://couponcp-a.akamaihd.net/loaders/1238/l.js?pid=1238&systemid=48ED0A3699754A4D8058F6665B50DBF5IE&aoi=1342800920&zoneid=58622
It does look like some kind of advertisement blocked by the corporate firewall, and may very well be the cause of that alignment issue.
Before I go nuts and post the source etc. may be somebody has an educated guess. Many thanks.