Javascript/Ajax input focus lost under IE

I have a form that uses AjaxAnywhere that is losing the focus to the next input tag following an ajaxAnywhere.submitAJAX(); call.  This only occurs in IE, Mozilla works fine.  

I maintain the form input tag where focus should go to within a form variable which is hidden in the form and conditionally set in the servlet.

In the jsp, I call a javascript function:
          function setFocus(focusIn) {
               // alert(focusIn);
              eval('document.myForm.'+focusIn+'.focus();');
          }
This function is called within an Ajax refresh zone as follows:
 <aa:zone name="inputFocus2">
            inputFocus: <bean:write name="myForm" property="inputFocus"/>    <-- debugging
<%
            String newFocus = myForm.getInputFocus();
            if((newFocus == null) ||
               (newFocus.length() == 0))
            {
               newFocus = "ptNumber";
            }
%>
            <script language="Javascript">
            <!--
               setFocus('<%= newFocus %>');
            // -->
            </script>
         </aa:zone>

What is strange, that if I have the 'alert', this will work in IE.  This behavior is very odd, does anyone know what I am not doing correctly to have IE 7 not work properly?
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