Well, I never got it working quite right. in FF it was never a problem, but IE just refused to behave! I ended up trying prototype expecting the exact same problem - scripts would not load/execute/ insert into DOM. To my surprise, everything worked out great using the Ajax.Request(url,{method:get, evalScripts: true, onLoading: showLoad, onSuccess: showResponse, onFailure: showError}). I am a complete javascript noob (like 1 month now?), so its probably my error. One thing I noticed coming from a totally uneducated standpoint, is that jQuery has a ROCKING methodology to access the DOM - prototypes is similar, but jQuerys is way easier and deeper that prototypes. I know you can use $$ to get objects by their CSS properties, but I can never get it to work the way I expect. Its really nice to be able to use $() for anything: $(div.class), $ (#divid) etc. And the object returned always seemed to be what I expected. I guess one question I should ask, is weather its possible to use both libraries together?