Frustration with styling dropdown forms

I want to style a dropdown form so that it appears completely differently to an OS driven form. This is notoriously a problem to make the form behave well cross browser and I'm yet to find a good solution.

I've tried this script: http://www.devirtuoso.com/2009/08/styling-drop-down-boxes-with-jquery/ which works fine for dropdown forms which have a small number of selectable items however it starts to break down cross-browser when a scroll bar is required to allow the user to navigate to the data item they desire.

My dropdown has 250 suc开发者_如何学Pythonh values so I'm left with a broken front-end. The mouse wheel can be used to navigate fine, but the form instantly disappears if the user selects the up ↑ or down ↓ OS buttons to navigate up and down the list.

Has anyone be able to crack custom styling dropdowns? Is there a workaround? Maybe a different script is in order?

Thanks.

Have you seen the jQueryUI Selectmenu plugin? I haven't tried it with as many values as you're describing, but its an unofficial jQueryUI plugin, so it might be your best bet. Plus it's accessible and will gracefully degrade for your users without JavaScript enabled.