Wrong URL?

You can put all of yor background properties into the background property http://www.w3.org/TR/CSS21/colors.html# ... background

The specs are quite handy to have a little look through, although some of it is pretty heavy going. And of course the w3c won't tell you about browser bugs, they just tell you how it is <i>supposed</i> to work!

In terms of trimming down the code even further, and this would probably have helped with the original problem, I keep all my layout graphics in the same folder as the stylesheet, and then just reference the filename from the .css file, with no path needed.