Related Products: How VM pulls in thumbnails in the backend.

[TroyRThompson]

I have been having an issue with the thumbnails for related products in the backend.

Many of my products do not show the thumbnail, but they show the short description with the thumbnail hidden at the bottom.

I believe this is happening because I changed the short description text field into a wysiwyg editor, inorder to place links and other html elements easily. 

Under these conditions, it seems that VM will pull in information starting from the first link in the short description.

I am trying to find a way to change how VM is pulling in the thumbnail.  I do not know which file I should be looking at, or how I could avoid VM pulling in information starting at the first link of the short description into the thumbnail.

Isn't there a way to reference the product's thumbnail directly instead of what I am assuming is some kind of expression match?

[TroyRThompson]

Is there any way a dev could point me in the right direction?

I just don't quite get how VM related products pulls in information (thumbnail and title) for the search in the backend.  It seems to search for some regular expression, as opposed to accessing the info in the database that references the image related to that product.