I am making this a community wiki, for three reasons:
I feel your pain! I recently went through a ridiculous troubleshoot where I tore everything out of the master page and page layout block by block (this was actually in SharePoint), continuously slimming down the page.
The end result ended up being not having a doc type for the html document (some developer had removed it). The lack of a doctype meant that IE 7 was running in quirks mode and the inline CSS emitted by the JQuery Accordion was behaving funky.
Consider adding:
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd">
At the top of your masterpage or html document (if there's not already a doctype defined).
There's actually a whole site dedicated to Quirks Mode behavior. You can check out an article about Quirks Mode here. I wrote a post which has a little more surrounding information on the troubleshoot.
Ran into the same issue, but this fixed it for IE 6 and 7:
$().ready(function(){
$(".ui-accordion-header").click(function() {
$(this).next().fadeIn();
});
)};
I think it makes the sliding look nicer anyway...
Try to use this:
{active: "a.default", alwaysOpen: "true", autoHeight: "false"}
instead of this:
{active: "a.default", alwaysOpen: true, autoHeight: false}
Explorer has issues with this kind of syntax.
I've been experimenting the same issue and after a while of messing around I found that if you have an element contained inside your main div with relative positioning, it will cause IE to open the accordion "jerky". Here's what I was doing...
<div id="accordion">
<h3 class="oneLine">Asylum</h3>
<div class="serviceBlockContent">
<p>Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Quisque sed augue a enim convallis facilisis. Aenean eu ullamcorper nulla. Ut id urna quis augue bibendum commodo et a quam.</p>
</div>
</div>
I had the H3 element position set to relative and that caused it to break in IE. Hope this is helpful.