A cheap fix for what sounds like awful UI (page refreshes every 5 seconds) would be to add '#' and the id of the element you want to keep in view to the URL in the address bar but that will automatically scroll to the top of the ID-linked element.
If this is a commercial product and you're in a hurry I'd recommend checking out JQuery's ajax implementation and knock off those reloads altogether.
It may be as simple as a line like:
$.ajax(
{
url:"/thisPath/requestPath",
complete:function(data){
//apply data (the http-response) to HTML
}
);
If that looks bizarre to you, it's just an object-literal being fed to the JQuery objects ajax method. The function assigned to the 'complete' fires when the http-response is received which is fed to the function as the argument 'data' which is established on the inside of the .ajax method.
