What was the problem? was it the unclosed <form> tag?
Edit with more info: Looks like removing any of the markup prevents the crash. "Removing the CSS, the div, the table, etc all cause this code to not crash IE"
<style type="text/css">
#a { margin: 0 10px 10px; }
#b { width: 100%; }
</style>
<table>
<tr>
<td>
<div id="a">
<form id="b">
<input type="text" name="test"/>
</div>
</td>
<td width="1">
</td>
</tr>
</table>
Removing the second td is enough to make the html not crashing on IE 9. The "crash" manifests itself in some kind of an infinite loop (one thread jumps to 100% CPU and stays so). Then the "recovery" mechanisms kick in, reloading the page, blocking again... :) Can anybody reduce it even more?