Thanks very much to all who've been thinking about this problem. @Michael, James: I've been working all morning to reproduce my problem in code I can post, but I'm coming up empty. In fact, when my app talks to a remote database I see no problems. I only see the glitch when my app talks to a local database. This leads me to believe that a bug in my code crops up when the database responds more quickly than anticipated, or perhaps my local database returns bogus data. My hunch is the latter. I'll have to rule out those possibilities before blaming jQuery.
As far as jQuery goes, the only other snippet I use and haven't mentioned is the following code for hijaxing links: $(function() { $(".links A").live("click", function() { var contentgoeshere= $(this).parent().parent(); $.get($(this).attr("href"), function(response) { $(contentgoeshere).html(response); }); return false; }); }); This hijaxes links used for paging in my jQuery-UI tabs. @Oliver: Loading jQuery.js from Microsoft's CDN didn't help.