Short and sweet not working for external pages

I am adding WP to a customer site and trying to add excerpts to external pages. I have tried:

<?php
 /* Short and sweet */
 define('WP_USE_THEMES', false); //also tried with true and no luck
 require('news/wp-blog-header.php');
 ?>

and also the following which is what it took on another WP site I did:

<?php
/* Short and sweet */
define('WP_USE_THEMES', false);
require('news/wp-blog-header.php');
session_save_path('session/');
ini_set('session.gc_probability', 1);
?>

and neither work in IE. I get all kinds of different errors, not just the same. sometimes it will show blocks of code from WP, sometimes it just changes the formatting all up on the site, and others it says “””ink”);””” in the top line without the “””.

Any idea on how I can rectify this?

the code I am using to display the code is:

<?php
$posts = get_posts('numberposts=3&order=DEC&orderby=post_title&cat=3');
foreach ($posts as $post) : start_wp(); ?>
<div class="wp_excerpt">
<a class="newsPostTitle" href="<?php the_permalink() ?>" rel="bookmark" title="Permanent Link to <?php the_title(); ?>"><?php the_title(); echo "<br />"; ?></a> 

<p><?php the_excerpt(); ?> </p>
</div>
<br />
<?php
endforeach;
?>

Any ideas? this works fine in firefox, chrome, safari, and opera.

thanks,

Clint