Exception thrown & not caught: IE6, IE8 w/ & w/o compatibility mode

I just configured a slider in a Drupal 7 test site (latest version) using Views Slideshow & Views Slideshow Cycle (v. 7.x-3.0-alpha1). The slideshow works well in most browsers, but IE6, IE8 & IE8+compatibility mode generate the following error (only on the page w/ the slides). The slideshow itself doesn't work in these browsers. Errors for both development & minified shown:

User Agent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 8.0; Windows NT 5.1; Trident/4.0; .NET CLR 2.0.50727; .NET CLR 3.0.4506.2152; .NET CLR 3.5.30729; .NET4.0C; .NET4.0E; BRI/2) 
Timestamp: Fri, 23 Sep 2011 20:06:50 UTC 
Message: Exception thrown and not caught 
Line: 16 
Char: 14229 
Code: 0 
URI: https://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.5.2/jquery.min.js
--------------------------------------------------------------------- 
User Agent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 8.0; Windows NT 5.1; Trident/4.0; .NET CLR 2.0.50727; .NET CLR 3.0.4506.2152; .NET CLR 3.5.30729; .NET4.0C; .NET4.0E; BRI/2) 
Timestamp: Fri, 23 Sep 2011 20:18:55 UTC 
Message: Exception thrown and not caught 
Line: 978 
Char: 15 
Code: 0 
URI: https://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.5.2/jquery.js

The line in question in the development jQuery code appears to be:

finally { 
         fired = [ context, args ]; 
         firing = 0; 
} 

The slideshow contains 3 images & 3 text blocks, with a pager displayed below the slides; my view is configured to use thumbnails for the pager & I created a longtext field for the text. I'm also displaying the title as a heading in the text field using the rewrite function. I'm not getting this error on other pages that use jQuery, e.g., the accordion on my FAQ page. Also, don't know if error occurs in IE9 as I don't have ability to test.

Here's the generated javascript on the page:

<!--//--><![CDATA[//><!--
jQuery.extend(Drupal.settings, 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//--><!]]>