The infamous Operation Aborted error is Internet Explorer's (and only Internet Explorer) way of dying very ungracefully when loading a web page. Googling it will result in all kinds of solutions, but the plain and simple facts are this. This error only occurs if you try to manipulate a DOM element via JavaScript before the element you are trying to manipulate is loaded. Below are two sample HTML examples illustrating this point. Open each of these files in Internet Explorer (IE) 6 or 7 to see the differences.

This is no longer an issue in IE8... well it's still an issue, but a little quieter about it and it actually renders pages now instaed of showing you the page for a split second than giving you the error (IE7 and <). See this article, What Happened to Operation Aborted?, http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/archive/2008/04/23/what-happened-to-operation-aborted.aspx).

This issue can also occur because of a race condition that occurs due to an Internet Explorer/ASP.Net AJAX bug. The probability of encountering this issue increases when the application has a significant number of ASP.Net AJAX enabled server controls on the web page. The issue is explained here, http://seejoelprogram.wordpress.com/2008/10/03/fixing-sysapplicationinitialize-again . I added this fix to my project and all is good now. This fix from what I can tell is still required if using ASP.NET 3.5 SP1. If you're interested, I raised the question about the AJAX issue here on Stack Overflow, http://stackoverflow.com/questions/757758/internet-explorers-operation-aborted-and-latency-issue .

Enjoy.