Betsy,
Very sorry for the delay in getting back to this, and thanks for the input and feedback on the issue. It does look like there's an issue with the "placeholder" text in older browsers that frankly we weren't aware of. Basically, most browsers in the last 4-5 years support placeholder *except* for IE9 and lower.
There is some Javascript that we're investigating adding to the SCLogin module to add compatibility with these older browsers. It's no overly difficult, but not something I can say will be available tomorrow. We're about to release a big version of our social networking extension which is taking all of our time now. I've added this investigation to be done after that and we will hopefully have a release out early/mid next month with this support.
For reference, the library we'll likely be using is:
github.com/mathiasbynens/jquery-placehol...query.placeholder.js
You can see a demo of it:
stackoverflow.com/questions/6366021/placeholder-in-ie9
Please feel free to test that demo in IE9 and let us know if that seems to fit the bill.
Thanks again,
Alex