>I could have sworn at the .NET release conferences MS said that ASP.NET would detect the browser and generate it's pages code based upon the capabilities if the client. Is that incorrect? Are there components of ASP.NET that will simply not work in any browser but IE5?

For most web forms, there's really not a lot to detect, but for the some server controls, like Validation objects, the Calendar object, and other complex controls, ASP.NET can use the appropriate JScript or HTML depending on the browser.

There are probably some that only work with IE, but for the most part, it seems pretty standard.