well, several things... may or may not have anything to do with the problem you are seeing with IE.

• Everyone highly recommends using CGI rather than rolling your own HTML.
• You're referencing @recordnum[$i] and @record[$i]. However I think you probably should be doing:

  use strict;
  my $i = 1;
  my @recordnum = ('this', 'that', 'those');
  my @record = (1, 2, 3, 4);
  
  print "<button type='submit' name='butCat' class='sub' value='$recordn
  +um[$i]'><b>$record[$i]</b></button>";
  [download]

• Finally, I'm certainly not a HTML guru, but I would probably mess with spacing using a class and a CSS.