.html is really really slow in IE

.html is really really slow in IE

I'll start by saying that I'm new to jQuery and am only marginally familiar with javascript. I normally build the server side, but the web developer is on vacation...

I have the following code. The success function is called pretty quickly (~2 seconds) so I know the server is moving fast enough. I threw the alerts in so I could time between different parts of the success function. The problem area is between 2nd and 3rd alerts. It takes ~25 seconds on Firefox (not stellar, but acceptable). In IE, it takes 7 minutes. So the question I have is, what is going on inside the .html function that would take so long in IE? The data is a table with 675 rows. Each row contains 5 cells (checkbox and label, text, text, two inputs and a select, three inputs). What is going on inside .html? Does it callback to some of our code (similar to a SAX parser) as it blows through the html, or is it simply replacing the current body contents with the new contents? Is there anything I can do to speed it up?

  jQuery.ajaxq("gen", {
    url: "/servlet/Repo",
    cache: false,
    type: "post",
    data: data,
    success: function(html) {
      alert("getting tag");
      var tmp = jQuery("#"+targetTag);
      alert("doing .html");
      tmp.html(html);
      alert("after .html");
    },
    error: function(xhttp, textStatus, errorThrown) {
      jQuery("#"+targetTag+" #loadBlur").remove();
      jQuery("#"+targetTag+" #loadConfirm").remove();
      dynAlert('alert','<div id="genError" class="errorMessage"><h2>#gl("title_error")</h2></div>');
    });