Joomla 1.5 SEF Urls breaks province/state/region menu (and other stuff?)

[rand486]

Joomla 1.5.26
Virtuemart 2.0.12f

Despite upgrading to the latest version of VM, this problem hasn't gone away (it started with 2.0.8 ).  After I enabled SEF urls using the Joomla core, my customers can't register with VM.  The provinces don't list.

There is only one country choice anyway, so I've thought about just changing the core so it lists them statically, but I don't want to change this every time I update VM.

Everything I've googled says it's a JQuery collision, but that simply isn't so.  It worked before SEF was enabled, and didn't after SEF was enabled.  Firebug's console does not show a JQuery collision, and JQuery.noConflict is being used anyway.

Is there a solution here?

As a side note, I'm also experiencing a problem where certain products do not have tax charged on them, but I'll post that separately.  I suspect it is also related to SEF Urls, as it only seems to be happening with products I've created after the SEF Urls got enabled, but I am not certain.