I got rid of all of the excess junk in my sidebar and left only the WP stuff such as categories, links, etc… and the problem was fixed. After that I started putting the extra stuff back in, one at a time. Two of the extras caused problems. The Skype button as mentioned above, and the hit counter I was using, provided by statcounter. Now that those two are gone the page seems to load properly in IE & Firefox.
I validated the code as suggested and started off with 80something errors. After deleting the Skype button and the Statcounter script I’m down to 37 errors.
Thanks for the suggestions & help!