Thank you for the help guys. After much troubleshooting it turns out that the problem was that IE was rendering in compability mode rather than standards mode. I changed the page header to state strict, but that still did not work. Here is the trick. In IE 9 turn on the menu bar, then under compatibility settings dialog box there is a check box that tells IE to render all "intranet" sites as compatibility mode. That was my problem. Because this was a dev server IE thought it was an intranet and rendered in 'quirks' mode not matter what. I turned that off and everything was good. Hope this helps someone else beceuase this was an odd one to track down.

Thanks again. Chad.