The main problem with the appearance of the application involves the use of the <center> tag, but is not due to the <center> tag per se.
When the panelGrid is used:
<ice:panelGrid columns="5" >
<center>
<ice:commandLink action="#
{AuctionBean.sortByTitle}" />
</center>
...
the behavior is different with ICEfaces 1.8 and JSF 2.0 (we may have encountered the same problem with a Facelets version of this page). The ICEfaces JSP parser parses the XML and represents the <center> tag as a single component. JSF 2.0, on the other hand, finds three components: "<center>", <ice:commandLink>, and "<center/>" causing the rendering of the panelGrid to be very different. The same problem would be encountered if any nested markup was used within the panelGrid. To repair the page, the individual cells of the panelGrid must be actual JSF components, such as panelGroup. The replacement markup is as follows:
<ice:panelGrid columns="5" >
<ice:panleGroup><center>
<ice:commandLink action="#{AuctionBean.sortByTitle}
" />
</center></ice:panelGroup>
...
First step is just to investigate the problem. Note that this application serves as a test case for users porting existing ICEfaces 1.8 applications to ICEfaces 2.0, so we should prefer fixes in icefaces-compat to application changes.