Do you have a link or some sample code that we could see?
Frankly, I always thought the ordering thing with CSS was daft. Going link-hover-active-visited would be far more intuitive, because this is the flow through which almost every link actually progresses: it appears on a page, then you hover over it, then you activate it, and then on subsequent pageviews it shows up as visited. I see how the specificity rules in CSS make link-visited-hover-active necessary, but frankly this is one of those areas where I almost wonder if a hack to the system wouldn't have been a Good Idea.