After setting a focus event on a textarea element and changing the text of that element, as soon as text is entered from keyboard input, IE 7/8 will crash.

After the focus event is finished running the below code, any additional keyboard input will cause IE to crash. It does not seem to get stuck in any loops...it crashes immediately.

$('#textarea').focus(function(){
   $(this).text("");
   $(this).css("color","#000");
});

Changing the above code block to this example seems to solve the problem.

$('#textarea').focus(function(){
   document.form.textarea.value = "";
   $(this).css("color","#000");
});