the W3C validator didn't like the attribute "frameborder", but I haven't found anything to replace it
Your web pages use the HTML 5 Doctype Declaration and the frameborder attribute is not supported in HTML5 (although most modern browsers will deal with the attribute in HTML 5 web pages OK).
It you want your web pages to validate correctly, you should use CSS instead, for example:
<iframe src="http://www.example.com/index.html" width="800" height="600" style="border-style: none;"></iframe>I am glad that you have found a solution to your problem.
However, being that the problem was with Internet Explorer and knowing that you are using an iframe, you might have had successful results using the allowtransparency attribute within your iframe. Please note that this is a proprietary Microsoft attribute which will also fail validation. It will be applied to Internet Explorer and ignored in other browsers.
<iframe src="http://www.example.com/index.html" width="800" height="600" style="border-style: none;" allowtransparency="true"></iframe>