well, i think the reason it wont let you select text is because its an input inside an anchor, but i cant change the wrapper without losing the default styling from vb (and i dont want to copy that because then it wont pick up a custom style!)
so... i guess i can fallback on what you suggested - just clear out the text if they click into the box. they can still get to the old results by clicking the word search instead of in the box though, so they wont have to re-search if thats what they wanted.