Well I did not manage to solve this issue directly. However, there was another bug that I ran into which involved the java swing library not working on the production machine. The solution was to add the following tag as the first element of head:
<meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="IE=EmulateIE8"></meta>
This forces IE to use IE8 instead of IE9. This trick solved this other issue, but inadvertently solved this issue as well. Here are several links that helped lead me to the solution (amongst others): http://sourceforge.net/p/djproject/discussion/671154/thread/d7662f61 http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/ie/ff959805.aspx#_Compatibility_issues_with_1