Description of problem: If one goes to the public site of a content section when there's nothing published, IE will report a 404. The issue is with cms/web/packages/content-section/www/index.jsp. This index page is used when nothing is published. It explicitly sets 404 before displaying a message. Mozilla based browsers display the 'Nothing Published' message, but IE just reports a 404.
This is something that is common with IE. If an error page is less than xxxbytes (I forget the numer) it will show the "friendly error message". The way around this is either to put more detail in the error page or put a long html comment.