I'm looking into this; it's really not an issue of the ad covering the recent posts box, instead an issue that something is blocking the scripts that generate those blocks. I know people in firefox/chrome sometimes see this issue because of noscript, but I'm not sure yet what the cause is in IE.
Sorry, and I hope to find something soon In the mean time, though, if you go to "What's new?", you get an even more awesome list of recent posts!