From what we can tell, the issue can only reproduced with the just-ice.jar.

This is a strange issue. I can see that inputText component already have IE specific focus fix onmousedown="this.focus()".

This is easily reproduceable. I have noticed that on each update we get the following markup.

Elememt 0 : <div id="mainForm:stateSavingMarker" style="width:0px;height:0px;"><
input type="hidden" name="javax.faces.ViewState" id="javax.faces.ViewState" value="j_id30:j_id48" /></div>
Elememt 1 : <script id="YR3GMjELqxFjJqANbTpvaA:1:dynamic-code" type="text/javasc
ript"></script>

However "javax.faces.ViewState" values keeps changing.

As we can see that above update snippet doesn't contain any info about inputText or selectManyMenu and doesn't try to set focus on anything.

I suspected on empty script tag, so tried to not send script tag if it was empty. But same behavior.

Tried not to render StateSaving div for testing purpose, client side issue was gone, but app was messed up .

I found one interesting thing.

The markup of the demo look something like this.
<dataTable>
<column>
<selectManyMenu>
<inputText PARTIAL_SUBMIT = true>
</column>

It produces DOMupdate mentioned above. If I set the partialSubmit on selectManyMenu instead of inputText, then update remains same but focus problem gets fixed.

<dataTable>
<column>
<selectManyMenu PARTIAL_SUBMIT = true>
<inputText >
</column>

As we can see with two different markups one markup is causing focus issue, and second one doesn't, and update was same for both markups, which mean there is nothing wrong with domupdate.

Problem happens when the input has focus and we select an item from the list using ctrl + mouse click. This cause onblur on inputText which do the partialSubmit and client selects an item from the list. Seems like some thing internally happening within IE that causes the IE focus manager to get confused.

It seems that the update of javax.faces.ViewState value on each submit is due to the behavior of com.sun.faces.application.StateManagerImpl state manager. When view's state is saved a new identifier is assigned on every JSF lifecycle. Thus the input element holding javax.faces.ViewState's value is updated continuously.

This has been changed in JSF 2.0 for Ajax interaction – Ajax interaction does not result in a new ViewState key.

Okay, I've seen this issue now on a couple versions of IE7. Can't reproduce it using Fusion on OSX as for some reason the ctrl key doesn't work to initiate the multi-select in the list. Issue doesn't happen if you don't use ctrl (shift is fine, for example).

Doesn't happen on IE8.

Seems to be a very strange IE7 bug/glitch. I'll add some work-arounds.

Since this is a very specific IE7 glitch there is not much we can do, unfortunately. I have documented several work-arounds in the JIRA on how to regain focusability if it occurs, as well, Adnan has suggested small changes to the partialSubmit config. of the two involved components which also resolves the issue.