HELP please with disabling State Dropdown Box

[Lunabu]

I live in Ireland and have been been spending lots of time trying to get the State field set up in a way that customers can manually enter a value in the State/Province field as suggested in the Zen Cart book on page 87 and page 290. This doesn't appear to work.
I tried to set the
State - always display a pulldown
to false, but that doess't work and it comes up the same way as if I set it to true.
I've now disabled the State box altogether, but that's only a temporary solution.
Can someone please help? I'm at the end of my tether.
Many thanks!

[canopy]

Could you re-enable the State drop-down field and check what happens if you click on other countries with State information. E.g. Canada, Spain, Switzerland?

[Lunabu]

Hi,
Thanks very much for your reply.
I think this has to do with the zones I set for my shipping options.
I have Ireland, European Union and Worldwide.
Countries which have provinces/states/counties listed in the database will show these up on the pull-down.
However, countries which don't have provinces etc. in the database will show up as
Ireland, European Union or Worldwide in their provinces/states/counties field.
That looks silly in an address; that's why I wanted to enable this field in such a way that customers can put in their own state etc. information, but I haven't succeeded in doing that in spite of following the instructions in the book.
The ONLY alternatives I can see at present are either
to have the pulldown box set to "true" with the above result
or to have it set to "false" and the State field set to "false"
and customers won't have a field for their province etc. at all.
I cannot seem to find a way around this

[Lunabu]

Could this possibly offer a solution to my problems? Or am I simply missing something here?
I think that the Zen Cart book is very good, but I DO think that some technical knowledge is required and I certainly wouldn't have got as far as this without the help of other people.

[canopy]

Do note that disabling the State/Province field altogether can have some side effects as mentioned on pg 114 of the book.

I'm not sure I understand your problem completely without having a look when the State field is enabled. But it seems like there might be a misconfiguration somewhere or I've misunderstood your intentions completely.

[Lunabu]

Thanks for your reply.
I've tried to explainit to the best of my ability; sorry if I caused confusion. I'm now going to re-enable the state field as well as the drop down box. Maybe that will allow you to see where I made a mistake.
Thanks so much for trying to help me; I'm really stuck with this one

[Lunabu]

Correction:
In my post #4, I wrote: "Could this possibly offer a solution to my problems?" But then I forgot to add the link I was referring to:
http://www.zen-cart.com/index.php?ma...roducts_id=587
Would this help me sort out my problems with the State/County field?