To reply to my own befuddlement to maybe help others wrestling with IE, prepending something to the page's title doesn't work. Calling a function that prepended information from the JSON into the <title> tag was failing, and causing subsequent functions to fail.
So, it wasn't version 1.2.3, but it is a quirk of jQuery that you can't modify the title tag. It could go wider than the title tag and include anything in the <head>, but I've not tested that scenario yet. And I say "quirk of jQuery" because I've found a wrong-around using straight javascript for now. -jody