Could you please give this a try? When using CSS, only the td elements will have their color changed. This code snippet is intended to change the row color:
Here's an example:
$(document).ready(function() {
$('#example').dataTable();
$('table.display tr.even').hover(function(){
$(this).css('background-color','#f00');
});
$('table.display tr.even').mouseout(function(){
$(this).css('background-color','#f9f9f9');
});
} );
If it's not necessary, you can remove the sorting_1 class name from the first td element, or alternatively, you could simply overwrite the existing CSS.