The problem is that when IE sees this:
<meta http-equiv="refresh" content="0;http://www.example.com" />
it expects the contents attribute to contain a number. The only time IE will check for a URL is if the content attribute contains “URL=” so the redirect that is most usable in all browsers is this:
<meta http-equiv="refresh" content="0;URL=http://www.example.com" />
The above example would redirect immdetiately but if you changed the 0 for another number it would wait that many seconds. Hope this all makes sense, it should work just fine but I still think my first idea was the better one.