it's easy to replicate. just take the sample code given for the sortable, and add 20 or 30 items to cause a scrollbar on the page.
in IE8 the behaviour described above happens; ie if you scroll down and start to drag an element lower in the page the scroll position jumps to the top, the handle is not over the element being dragged, and you cannot get the browser to scroll down.
frustratingly all other browsers I've tried appear to work perfectly (Opera, FF, Chrome).
so far the closest I can get to a workaround involves adding some handlers at the start and end of a drag...
$(".dragdrop").sortable(
{
connectWith: '.dragdrop',
start: function(event, ui) {
if ((ui.helper !== undefined ) && ($.browser.msie)) { // I know, bad to single out IE
var offset = getScrollXY()[1]; // where getScrollXY()[1] = method for getting scroll position
ui.helper.css('position','absolute').css('margin-top', offset);
}
},
beforeStop: function (event, ui) {
if ((ui.offset !== undefined ) && ($.browser.msie)) {
ui.helper.css('margin-top', 0);
}
}
... but this only corrects the handle position and doesn't help with the actual scrolling issue. The suggested fix made no difference