setting HTM5 text kills scrollbar drag in Chrome

I have a timer in Javascript that fires once per second to update some text in the page (HTML5) like this:

document.getElementById('CountDown').innerHTML = "some string";

This works fine except that if this code runs while the user is dragging a scrollbar handle the drag is aborted. This is a very annoying user interface behaviour which I have not been able to resolve. If I comment out the line in the timer event then the scrollbar works normally.

Note that it only happens on Chrome, not on Firefox or Opera. Any idea how to address this?

from setting HTM5 text kills scrollbar drag in Chrome