jQuery Grid Plugin - jqGrid

I am running into a problem in jqgrid 3.7.2 and 3.6.5 in IE 8.  Works great if FF and Chrome.

The IE error is: 

URI: http://localhost.:8090/jmvc/portal/resources/jquery-plugins/jquery.jqGrid-3.6.5/js/jquery.jqGrid.min.jsCode: 0Char: 410Line: 38Message: 'a.rows.0.cells' is null or not an object

Timestamp: Fri, 30 Jul 2010 18:04:44 UTCUser Agent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 8.0; Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; Trident/4.0; SLCC2; .NET CLR 2.0.50727; .NET CLR 3.5.30729; .NET CLR 3.0.30729; Media Center PC 6.0; .NET CLR 1.1.4322; .NET4.0C)
Webpage error details

I believe the error in the uncompressed script is line 1233 of grid.base.js:

if(ir>0) {ts.grid.cols = ts.rows[0].cells; if(ts.p.records===0) { ts.p.records=len; } }

I was able to determine that in my instance ir was 25, ts was not null.