If you've read this far hoping this might be your solution, I've had to abandon this as a viable method for controlling an arduino through a web page where all the html was client-side. the issue is with the rules governing how AJAX behaves and how it hates cross-domain scripting. What I ended up doing was throw out the webduino library and add some TcpSocket code to my ActiveX Object to communicate with the Arduino. It's mostly working now except for a memory leak I haven't found yet. I'm going to post my sketch and hopefully get some insight on that. The ActiveX object is still a bit of a work in progress as well. I haven't gotten it to where Internet Explorer sees it as safe for scripting yet.