Will take me a while (til tonight) to get a smallish subset of the code to demo the problem.
I've noticed in several different versions of my code that a style modifier is left on the scrollable item. sometimes it's style="display:none;" other times it's style="display:block;". and I've even seen style="". In some cases, I have defined a helper function. in other's I have not. I also noticed that when I set the opacity property in the sortable widget to something < 1.0, there was a style="opacity:1.0;" left over.
will update later when I get a chance.
Mark