QuickForm javascript / setDefaults

I have a QuickForm working correctly. My app is a quiz. The user registers, takes the quiz and is passed back to the form to start again if they don't pass the quiz. I record the randomly generated set of questions and the user info to a table for each quiz attempt. I've created via setDefaults, $_SESSION vars that contain the First, Last, etc. My problem is that when the user is returned to the form the javascript errors are displayed for the required fields and the setDefaults values are filling in the form fields correctly. The result being that I've got bogus error messages being displayed; a distracting UI. I'm not sure where to begin my troubleshooting process. Here's a sample entry for a field in the form: $form->addElement('text', 'Last', 'Last:'); $form->addRule('Last', 'Please enter your Last name.', 'required', false, 'client'); $form->addRule('Last', 'Invalid characters in Last name.', 'regex', '/^[ a-zA-Z\',.-]+$/','client'); Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated. Peter