Thanks - that did the trick for forced population.
Though now an interesting problem has developed - after forcing in a .innerHTML value to the Cute editor, if I then make some changes within the "Normal" view of the editor (manually editing the text), when I POST the form the changes don't go through. I.E. if I fill the .innerHTML with "foo" via JS, and then type "Test" in the editor, only "foo" comes through on the posted side. I can work around this by implementing a js based copy of the innerHTML value back to the original (hidden) textarea that Cute is replacing, but it begs the question of why a manual copy is needed. Does Cute perform some sort of onsubmit event to make sure edits in the "Normal" window are copied back into the original textarea? This is using IE 6.0xxx.
I should mention this form isn't raising the submit event and is getting posted via an asynchronous XMLHTTP request - this would kill any sort of built in onsubmit features Cute is dependant on.
Thanks for your thoughts.
-eyepulp