This has gotten so far,that I will sum up what we found out:
Inside the event handler the attribute src cannot be read in IE8 (FF works fine), neither with
$(document).ready(function () { $("#imgReload").click(function () { $('#<%=imgCaptcha.ClientID %>').removeAttr("src"); $('#<%=imgCaptcha.ClientID %>').attr("src", "Captcha.ashx"); }); });