Focus, focus, focus

As mentioned in my previous post at http://forums.asp.net/t/1337814.aspx  I am just having sooo many problems with setting the focus that it is just driving me haywire.  I'm going to post as little code as possible below here.  If this is insufficient, please let me know.  Essentially, MySetFocus gets called in the onLoad event of the master page.  It checks if all the WebServices are done (counter = 5), if not, it calls itself again after waiting 100 ms.  If so, then it gets the Item name that we'll be focusing on (essentially the ClientID) through a WebService call and the success function (setItemToFocus) finally does the focusing.  For a particular example (the source is included at the bottom), I am calling document.getElementById("Item9").focus() and that still doesn't set the focus.  There is no call on the PreRender event or anything after Load anywhere so this sh ...