You could stack the <img>s above offending <i>s. The code below removes the hasLayout fix, but stacks the images above the white bars you were seeing before:
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
<head>
<title>Test</title>
<style type="text/css">
img {
position: relative;
z-index: 1;
}
p {font-size: 20px; background-color:#FFF;}
div {width: 200px; border: 2px solid red;}
</style>
</head>
<body>
<img src="http://www.google.com/intl/en_ALL/images/logo.gif" style='float:left;'>
<p><i>This is an italic sentence.</i></p>
<p><strong>This is a bold sentence.</strong></p>
<p>This is a normal sentence.</p>
<div>
<p>Here is a sentence. <i>Here is an italic sentence.</i> Here is another sentence.</p>
</div>
</body>
</html>
Pat
2009-08-19 01:26:19