> another odd thing, is that I do not see the form in the source when viewed by the client
> browser, is this just a fact of life for dhtml

Yes, because it's the Javascript object XMLHttpRequest provided by the browser at work when fetching content using Ajax. AFAIK, the actual DOM contents at any point in time can be viewed in Firefox using the tool DOM Inspector.

> onClick="javascript:validate_form();"
Don't use Javascript pseudo protocol. It was meant only to be used inside the href attribute of links.

One of the ways to narrow down your problem would be to put a DOCTYPE declaration at the top of your page (without which the browser goes in quirks mode of rendering, in short you have an invalid HTML document) and validate your generated markup at W3C validator.

The next step would be to use the FF error console for spotting errors which don't show up in IE just because IE let's them "slide".