Locators don't work in IE?

If you have ever tried to run selenium RC scripts On IE then you would probably know by now that a lot of the locators don't work. Some times they do work but take unacceptable amount of time.
The only way to make them work on IE is to use xpath of that object as its locater and not what selenium IDE records.
I use xpather and xpath-checker for finding the xpath. Both of these are Firefox addons and are free. Xpather could be used to find the full xpath (from top of the document to that node) of any element and xpath-checker allows you to optimize xpath expressions interactively. I think these two are essential tools for any selenium enthusiast especially those who wants selenium to work cross-bowser.
In the following posts I will explain how one could optimize xpath expressions and make them look less ugly.