Under some very specific circumstances (which I haven't been able to completely figure out), the children() call can be extremely slow (on the order of 10 seconds in IE8) or appears to loop infinitely (on FF3.6)

This only happens under certain selectors, and the failure appears to occur in the chunker.exec call on the selector.

An example of such a selector is:

var selector = "input[name=f_5303][value*=\\"Test%20%22%20and%20'%20pipe%20%7C%20pipe!\\"]"

Unfortunately I've been unable to find a general case to say "it fails for apostrophes" or something, although the problem seems to be somehow related to the apostrophe (cleartext) and/or pipe (encoded as %7C) in the above selector.