It does work in IE7 and Firefox but probably not in IE6 which doesn't support the hover attribute except on a href.
I tested with a table and a div. It's best to give a width and height if you have no text in the td or div.
td.name and td.name:hover styles will also work with td but I had to leave out the td to get it to work with a div as well.
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.1//EN"
"http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml11/DTD/xhtml11.dtd">
<html>
<head>
<meta name="keywords" content="Wickham"/>
<meta name="description" content="Test items"/>
<meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html;charset=iso-8859-1"/>
<title>Test</title>
<style type="text/css">
.name
{
background: url(orangew90x90.jpg) no-repeat;
}
.name:hover
{
background: url(greenw90x90.jpg) no-repeat;
}
</style>
</head>
<body>
<table width="90" height="90"><tr><td class="name">
</td></tr></table>
<div style="width: 90px; height: 90px;" class="name"></div>
</body>
</html>