Problem calling web service on Safari

If having a devil of a time with this one. I have a simple script that attaches a click handler (via jQuery) to all anchor tags on a page. The click handler simply gets the text of the hyperlink and passes it as a parameter to an ASP.NET web service. Here is the very simple code:
$(function()
{
$('a').live('click', function(event)
{
MyService.TrackClick($(this).text());
});
});
The desired behavior here is to call the service, then continue to execute the default behavior of the link. This works great in IE & Firefox, but does not work in Safari 3 (Mac or Windows). In Safari, this will execute the link's action, but does not call the service.
For grins, I stuck an "event.preventDefault()" in there, and then the service executed. Obviously the default behav ...