Wow, have I learned something here! The problem was not jQuery, the problem was that the page that was feeding the load had a couple of extra closing tags in the html. The browsers were choking on the extra closing tags. The thing that made it so hard to catch was when I would alert the data that was returned it would display the data.
Moral of the story...make sure that you have valid html. PS. I replaced the script that built the data with a simple html code and that would display just fine. That was how I finally figured out that the html had a problem.
