ajax, jquery, and php form load issues

I have searched long and hard to find a solution to this problem to no avail.

here is the jquery. on the php side I'm just using a small string to detect headers and such.

Code:

<script type="text/javascript" src="jquery.js"></script> 
<script type="text/javascript">
$("body").on("click", "button", function(){

$.ajax({
  type: 'POST',
  url: 'exec.php',
  cache: false,
  beforeSend:function(){
    //loading image
    $('#out').html('<div class="loading"><img src="loader.gif" alt="Loading..." /></div>');
  },
  success:function(data){
    //output the data
    $('#out').empty();
      $('#out').html(data);
  },
  error:function(){
    //failure
    $('#out').html('<p class="error"><strong>Oops!</strong> Try again...</p>');
  }
});
});
</script>
<div class="form">
<button>Play the Game</button>

(i know, i know "you should use $.post instead" I'm useing $.ajax beacuse it gives me a bit clearer idea of what is happening)

the issue I'm having is that while the ajax appears to activate every time, the php only responds the second time.

I.E. click(ajax send. no response), click(ajax send. response), click(ajax send. no response), click(ajax send. response) etc.

any help would be appreciated

 

i actually did move to the ('button').click(fucntion); style method after i posted this.

as for example page... that should give you an idea on what im trying to do here.

 

the php script I'm running is very simple(create random 5 char string, append that to imgur.com/ get headers, and return the whole thing back).

I had a feeling it would be server related.
for knowledge's sake I'm running the server on a powermac g4 1ghz (the MDD fw800 version)2gb of ram, and i have a 80gb hdd dedicated to web serving. I'm useing osx server 10.4 with all the latest and greatest updates.
I hacked in support for php5 and a newer version of mysql.

thanks to everyone who helped it is very much appreciated, and it looks like a newer/more powerful linux based personal server is in my future.