Textarea not accessible in Internet Explorer

Tinymce is working fine in FF but not in IE. The problem is that the textarea is not accessible. If the setting is rich text off by default, then when you go to a page to edit/add, the text area is accessible. If you then enable rich text, it is no longer so. Furthermore, when rich text is disabled again the textarea remains inaccessible.

I've tried debugging by removing all css and javascript (comment out in page.tpl.php) and the problem remains.