Any relative or abs positioning on descendants breaks scale only on IE8

[nine-2-five]

I have a slider with multiple slides that I wan't to scale on window.resize. The problem is with IE8. On all other browsers, including IE7, when the #slider_wrap is scaled, its children are scaled as well.
But on IE8, when I apply the scale transform only the #slider_wrap is resized, none of its children.
After some debugging I found that this happens if any of the children are relatively or absolutely positioned. When all the position rules are removed from children, the scale transform works, but it breaks my slider layout.
This is my slider layout:
#slider_wrap(absolute)
#slider(relative)
#slides(relative)
.slide(absolute)
I must remove all the positioning below #slider_wrap to get scale to work. Is there any help, other than reworking this custom slider that we use?