encyclo - 2:23 am on Dec 23, 2005 (gmt 0)

Back a few years ago, IIS functioned in a way which gave a speed advantage to IE over Netscape - the way that the HTTP connections were made was non-standard, missing certain parts of the RFC-defined sequence. I don't know if the same is happening still today with more modern versions of IIS (for the above we're talking about 3 or 4 years ago with IIS3.0 and 4.0 on WinNT) however you can be certain that IIS functions best when combined with IE, whereas Apache follows the HTTP specifications to the letter.

Note: the above is from memory, I'm struggling to find the article/documentation that will back this up...

However, is this really the cause of your problem? If once the page is loaded (but the footer is invisible), can you view the source code and see whether the markup for the footer is present? If so, then the problem is more likely to do with hide/show visibility in the Javascript than anything else.