hi,

I have found the answer though not in the quickest way. I rewrote the page so that I do AJAX via page methods and used Javascript to repeat the markup as required. This led me to discover that between each dropdown list change, clearing all child divs (the div which appeared from the old bound data) before binding the data, stopped it reapearing. the drop down list freeze went away too without update panels. It not works in Chrome and Safari fine

Thanks for testing it out, the fact that it worked for someone helped me