After troubleshooting this issue myself this week, it was determined by my host that the GD library, it’s dependencies, and PHP had to be rebuilt… which did the trick, everything’s running smoothly now. If you’re seeing these errors, you may want to consider contacting your host before you go changing your core files. 😉
Just wanted to say thanks… I was having the same issue with IE8 showing gallery thumbnails long and vertical, stacked. (Was perfect in FF, Opera and Safari)
Adding the width and padding above to nggallery.css (found in /wp-content/plugins/nextgen-gallery/css/) worked like a charm!
Make sure your “secret code” on the config.php file is correct… I had this same problem, and it was because the copy and paste of the secret code was missing a “)”.