 <p>I ended up having to set the innerHTML of the select.</p> <p>I came up with the following extension method that has a special routine for IE6:</p> <pre><code>$.fn.setDropDownValue = function(valueToSet) { if ((!this[0].options) || (this[0].options.length == 0)) return; if ($.browser.msie &amp;&amp; $.browser.version == 6.0) { var open = '&lt;OPTION value=\''; var html = ''; for (var i = 0; i &lt; this[0].options.length; i++) { var opt = $(this[0].options[i]); html += open + $(opt).val() + '\''; if (opt.val() == valueToSet) { html += ' selected'; } html += '&gt;' + opt.html() + '&lt;/OPTION&gt;'; } $(this).html(html); } else { this.val(valueToSet); } }; </code></pre>