jQuery always finds id's in the current DOM - it's not storing something based on first execution.

Are you using something like FireFox to debug? If not you should be doing so and then we can talk further about what your DOM has "live" for elements.

I always build my page with jQuery - sometimes even grabbing HTML from SQL select statements. I can always find new elements or it would be a useless tool.

And I'm using 1.7 as well...

Might you have ID's that are NOT unique on your page??