superfish conflict with dreamweaver tabbed panels in IE

superfish conflict with dreamweaver tabbed panels in IE

I'm having a weird issue where if I mouseover the superfish menu and immediately after mouseover a tab in a dreamweaver tabbed panel the content within the tabbed panel disappears. But only in IE.

I thought it might be an issue with the relative positioning and tried fooling around with z-index on both the .sf-menu ul and sf-menu li. It fixed the issue but now the submenu doesn't overlay everything on the page. I've tried making a z-index as high as 1000 but it still doesn't work. 

Any suggestions? Could the original problem be solved in javascript and not css? 

Here is the css
}
.sf-dropdowns ul {
position: absolute;
top: -999em;
width: 10em; /* left offset of submenus need to match (see below) */
}
.sf-dropdowns ul li {
width: 17em;
font-size: 11px;
}
.sf-dropdowns li:hover {
visibility: inherit; /* fixes IE7 'sticky bug' */
}
.sf-dropdowns li {
float: left;
position: relative;
width: 15em;
z-index: 1;
}

.sf-dropdowns li.hidden {
z-index: 999;
}
.sf-dropdowns a {
display: block;
position: relative;
}
.sf-dropdowns li:hover ul,
 .sf-dropdowns li.sfHover ul {
left: 0;
top: 2.5em; /* match top ul list item height */
z-index: 10000;

}


Thanks,
s.