Thanks jbrinkman.. That's just what I was looking for.  I knew it would be easy, it's easy when you know how!

Cheers,
Tim

Given that the search box is implemented as a skinobject, it is the most appropriate method for changing this search behavior.  Most of the responses I have seen have mainly focused on the UI aspects of the change.  Certainly, that aspect of the change was not anticipated to cause the problems it has.  We try to be very careful about not making breaking changes in code but we don't always think about how an otherwise small UI change may impact other skins.  Like many developers, we tend to test in our own environments, especially when making changes late in the release cycle, and when that works we assume that all is well.  While the skinobject change operated just fine in the default skin, it clearly has issues with many other skins.  While we all know better that to slip fixes in late in the cycle, we will sometimes shortcircuit the process a little just to get in that one last change.  And occassionally Mr. Murphy will show up to remind us why we put these processes in place to begin with.

With that said, we are working to correct the problem.  Over the next week or so we will look at alternatives to the existing implementation that allow us to provide the feature, while being more friendly to existing skin designs and providing better control over the feature to the site admin.