Category drop down gone from new items listed..

[BadMoodMoose]

No idea what I did to make it go away but I was getting the drop down to choose categories and I must have changed SOMETHING because I get the "type in" option which is not working and I'd rather not use it if it were. 

Below are a couple of pictures...the first is what it looks like now (the non working version) and then the second is what the drop down used to resemble (this is actually a shot of the category drop down). 

Can anyone think of what I did that messed up this option?? As it stands now I cannot add new items  and I was really on a roll with this thing finally...

Although they are old versions, I am using Joomla 1.5.26 and VM 1.1.9.  Please help! Thanks in advance...