selectlist not triggering page reload for Watir and IE

same problem that was described in this post Watir question regarding select_list and reloading but the solution is not working for me.

Setup is IE8, Watir 1.67. I have automation that selects a value from a dropdown list of languages. Selecting a language changes the text of the page to translated values. The automation 开发者_JS百科works correctly in Firefox; selecting the dropdown value triggers the page reload with the new text. I can see the selection happen in IE but no page reload. I have tried firing onclick, onselect(which gets an invalid argument exception), onchange with no luck. The Ajax call in question looks like this:

$('#localeSelect').change(function() {
            if ($('#localeSelect').val() != "") {
                var url = $('#localeSelect').val();
                $.ajax({
                    url: url,
                    success: function(){
                        window.location.reload();
                    }
                });
            }
        });

I don't get any Watir errors running the test, it just refuses to reload. I've run into this problem with IE a lot, and I am wondering if I can call the window.location.reload() directly if there is no other solution.

Thanks in advance, Sabrina

My guess is that you have to find which JavaScript event to fire: How to find out which JavaScript events fired?