Zen Cart 1.3.9h clean install with demo items.
Installed Category Tab Simple Dropdown Menu for testing.
PHP 5.3.6
MySQL 5.0.67
Linux 2.6.18-128.1.10.el5PAE

In another thread, a user was having trouble with the Category Tab Simple Dropdown Menu and one of the first things I noticed was the poor html with <br /> tags outside the <li> tags.

All attempts to remove the breaks resulted in the menu incorrectly wrapping menu items. That got to me and it became a challenge to find out what was happening.

I installed a clean 1.3.9h download (with demo) to one of our test sites and installed the mod with some adjustments to the mod and the the cart.

In the cart, I removed all but the Software, DVD Movies, Big Linked, A Top Level Cat, Sale New Price, and Big Unlinked directories in order to have a solid mixture of categories with and without sub-categories without having TOO much across the dropdown menu. I left the two "Big's" to make sure categories with only porducts were represented. I removed the linked items with master category IDs other than 22 from the Big Linked directory as they would not show in the dropdown and just as a process of getting to the bottom of the problem. (The problem with not gettting all products is connected to the query in the mod) There was another glitch in that the "Test Three" item in Big Unlinked was wrapping. This turned out to be from html embedded in the title of the product. (Again, something to be addressed in the mod at another time and not the cause of the problem.)

In the mod, I removed the css calls from the included tpl file and added them to the end of the stylesheet.css for the classic template. I removed the offending break tags from the included tpl_modules_categories_tabs.php file, created a templates directory under the classic directory, and loaded the tpl file there.

A clean load sets the categories tab menu to on, so there was no need to do any other changes or mods.

Starting the cart showed, the dropdown with all menus working correctly with the exception of Big Linked and Big Unlinked. Unlinked's problem turned out to be the embedded html in its title. Big Linked had two items ("A Maximum Sample of 1" and "A Maximum Sample of 3") on the same horizontal line of the dropdown. Further investigation showed that this was a dropdown that started from a category with no sub-categories and only products. This led me to the tpl_modules_catetgories_tabs.php file and the portion dealing with presenting categories with only products.

I first thought the problem might be with the Order By call in the query since it did not (like the other queries) include an Order By the product name but only by sort order. After several trial changes, this made no difference in the menu's presentation.

I then wondered if it might be that there were more than a certain number of products that triggered the wrap. Big Unlinked proved that assumption incorrect as there are far more products in that category than Big Linked,

My next step was to create sort orders for the products in the Big Linked as the demo items are all loaded with 0 as their sort order. My thought was that them all being 0, it could create the wrap. First I simply set the sort orders to match the IDs of the products. This still resulted in simply moving the two "A Maximum ..." items to a different line in the menu.

Then I noticed that the two wrapping items were together alphabetically, in product ID and in sort order. Then, I tried separating the two by setting 1's sort order to 10 and 3's sort order to 1000. As the French say, voila!

I have tried every combination that I can think of to break the menu in any other way, but the only way the menu fails is when these two items are placed together by sort order, product ID, or alphabetically. Breaking the chain with sort order makes everything work.

I double-screened the two products to see if there could be ANYTHING in the two products code- or symbol-wise that would cause this and couldn't see anything. And, I can't see anything in the database that might screw up a query.

So... I'm turning this over to this thread for review.

netzencommerceDOTcom/zc4 shows the cart as it appears with the two "A Maximum ..." items together either by Product ID, Sort Order, or Product Name.

netzencommerceDOTcom/zc5 shows the cart as it appears with the two "A Maximum ..." items separated by changing the Sort Order.

I'm stumped! Let's see what someone else can come up with. I'll be happy to provide admin username and password by PM if anyone wants to play.

THANX