I have used an iframe which looks like this:
Note that if you are only changing the #anchor of the URL (i.e. changing from page.php#this to page.php#that) then IE won't refresh the page but Chrome and Firefox will. If this is your issue then you may want to add something random to your query string to make IE think it's a totally new page and force the reload.
For example (using jQuery):
var hash = 'yourHash';
var rand = 1 + Math.floor(Math.random() * 9999);
var helpUrl = 'page.php?rand=' + rand + '#' + hash;
$('#iframe').attr('src', helpUrl);