Figured it out.
Later in the code if information checked out I directed the user to another page using header() function. It looked like this:
$products = $username."/userProducts.html";
header( "refresh: 3; '$products'" );
It should have looked like this:
$products = $username."/userProducts.html";
header( "refresh: 3; url='$products'" );
Forgot the "url=" So what ended up happening is for some reason it refreshed the page it was on and didn't resubmit the form data that caused the problem. Funny that it only happened in IE, really stressed over this one. Probably should have used Location: here anyhow, oh well.
Figured this out by submitting the values through the url like:
URL?username=blah&password=blah
this caused the page to refresh over and over..and I was like wt heck, so I was able to figure out what was going on. Problem solved. Thanks for the help.