I had a similar issue with setAttribute not working on IE. I put it in a try block, and in the catch block I used outerHTML for the IE version. outerHTML is read/write, so my function could dynamically get the code of the existing control, and then replace whatever had to change. One quirk is that IE rewrites the control's code in outerHTML, so I had to work around that a little, but it worked.
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I had a similar issue with setAttribute not working on IE. I put it in a try block, and in the catch block I used outerHTML for the IE version. outerHTML is read/write, so my function could dynamically get the code of the existing control, and then replace whatever had to change. One quirk is that IE rewrites the control's code in outerHTML, so I had to work around that a little, but it worked.