Makes sense.

This page is more helpfull
http://karma.nucleuscms.org/item/101

It suggests to me that if the css contains javascript it may error if we set it before appending to the document.. Is that your case?

Because outside of that, people have been using IE8/IE9 and less far more in the past and never reported this problem..

I think we can take this but I want to be sure it fixes your problem and we understand it - because the safest change is usually to do nothing.

Can css/less contain javascript? I'm using a DXImageTransform gradient for IE, but nothing else fancy.

I thought it might be the size of the css text (it was about 32KB), but tried a basic example and it was successful with twice that size.

I'm trying to think what changed to cause this.
I recently upgraded Less from 1.4 to 1.7, but i could reproduce the problem even when i went back to 1.3.
The only other thing i can think of is that the number of imports increased.

and this fix definitely fixes your problem (e.g. identical scenarios, with and without?)

Well, with my fix in place, IE 8 no longer crashes when running my application. I did not have time to investigate further.
Tommorrow i will try to narrow down the problem to a reproducible example.

okay I think we'll just take it. Don't worry about the example. Thanks for your contribution.

Ok, thanks

I did a bit more investigation.
I found that the problem is somehow caused by having .css files imported into a .less file. Removing those imports, or renaming them to *.less, stopped the crash.