intermittent ajax failure with jquery 1.5.1, asp.net, and firefox

I am lazy loading snippets of html on our page in order to improve performance. jQuery's load method does not provide access to the full ajax api (things like error callbacks) so I created a more robust version of it.

I am calling this method 3-5 times per page on just about every page load and am logging when there is some sort of error with ajax call. What I am finding is that about 0.3% of the time the ajax calls are failing the majority of the failures are in firefox 3.6. I am using jQuery 1.5.1 with ASP.NET server side. The 'errorThrown' parameter of the error callback reads:

[Exception... "Component returned failure code: 0x80040111 (NS_ERROR_NOT_AVAILABLE) [nsIXMLHttpRequest.getAllResponseHeaders]" nsresult: "0x80040111 (NS_ERROR_NOT_AVAILABLE)"

and the jqXHR reads:

{"readyState":4,"status":0,"statusText":"error"}

I have confirmed with users that they are experienceing this problem and it's not just bots or some logging of an unexperienced error.

here is the code for my "load" widget

(function ($) {
    $.fn.elfLoad = function (url, options) {

        return this.each(function () {

            var $elem = $(this);

            options = $.extend({}, {
                type: "GET",
                dataType: "html",
                data: "",
                error: function (jqXHR, status, errorThrown) {

                    $elem.html('<div class="elf-missing-content centerText">Doh! Something did not go so well when trying to load this content. Please try again later.');
                    elf.ajax.logInfo("data: " + options.data + " errorThrown: " + errorThrown + " webmethod: " + options.url + "jqXHR: " + JSON.stringify(jqXHR),"elfLoad");
                }
            }, options);

            options.success = function (data, status, jqXHR, responseText) {

                responseText = jqXHR.responseText;

                if (jqXHR.isResolved()) {

                   jqXHR.done(function (r) {
                        responseText = r;
                   });

                   $elem.html(responseText);
                }

                if (options.callback) {
                    var callbackArgs = {
                        responseText: responseText,
                        $elem: $elem,
                        status: status,
                        jqXHR: jqXHR
                    };
                    $elem.each(options.callback, [callbackArgs]);
                 }


            }

            options.url = url;

            if (options.data) {
                options.data = $.param(options.data, $.ajaxSettings.traditional);
                options.type = "POST";
            } else {
                 options.data = "";
            }

            $.ajax(options);
        });
    }
})(jQuery);

A call to it would look like this $('#container').elfLoad('url.aspx',{foo:'bar'});

Has anyone else had this problem? Any ideas? jQuery claims to have recently closed a ticket that looks like this in 1.5.1 but I see someone else is having a similar issue. http://bugs.jquery.com/ticket/8400

Thanks!

I ended up solving this issue by using a setTimeout for 2 seconds and retrying the request. So far this is working 100% of the time.