but IE is a huge pain because it does not read the
stylesheet changes unless you exit all instances of IE and start it up
again. I had to do this each time I commented something out to test
it.

I've found that going to

Tools > Internet Options > General tab > Temporary Internet Files fieldset

Settings > Check for newer versions...

and selecting "Every visit to the page" has fixed this in the past.
Alternately, I believe IE will do a forced refresh (bypass the cache) if
you hold down the Ctrl key while refreshing.

<xsl:template match="HtmlAttribute">
<xsl:attribute name="@name"><xsl:value-of

select="text()"/></xsl:attribute>

</xsl:template>

Not sure what you're trying to do without seeing the context, but have you
tried putting {} around @name?

FWIW I've been making extensive use of XSLT with MSXML since late 2000 and
have never had the degree of trouble you seem to have had. It's worth
creating a simple test harness using JScript to perform the transformation
directly rather than just relying on the browser; that way you have full
access to the error reporting capabilities of the XML parser and the XSLT
processor. A web browser is not intended as an XSLT development/debugging
environment; it needs to be supplemented with the proper tools.

Regards,

Nick.