If you want to feed padding only to IE, just use the selector that only IE is stupid enough to read the contents of:

* html <your element> {
padding: 3px 0 0 0;
}

It's a valid selector, allthough most browsers will understand that it doesn't actually describe any element at all seing as html may never have a parent. IE (6, 5.5, 5) on the other hand sees this as html <element>. Handy and valid trick!