jQuery Forum

This is my first time using the forums, so please excuse me if I do something wrong.

On my website I am using jQuery 1.5.1 and the latest jQuery Form plugin.  Wherever I have a textarea input, small inputs of less than about 10 characters fail to be sent to the server.  For example, if I have a form:

1. <form id="someform" method="post">
2. <textarea name="foo"></textarea>
3. <input type="submit" value="Send" />
4. </form>

If I enter a simple "bar" or even "bar bar" into the field and press the submit button, php sees a POST variable named "foo" but it is empty.  Repeatedly pressing submit does not modify the behavior.  The only thing that seems to ever cure the problem is padding the "bar" until around 10 characters have been input.  I used the Chrome browser's javascript console to test the following:

1. $('#someform textarea').fieldValue();

This returns the correct value no matter how few characters are input.

All of my forms function correctly once the textarea fields have been padded to sufficient length.  I am at this point confounded.