lucy24 - 7:45 pm on Aug 17, 2011 (gmt 0)

I did notice that the issue goes away if I change the font to Arial. But I'm required to use Verdana for the design. Any ideas?

That's the hidden drawback to forcing fonts. There can be multiple fonts with the same name, depending on age and platform and so on. The Palatino I use today is not the Palatino I adopted in 1990. You could try forcing a line-height in ems. Or, as a last resort, pixels.