The div where they put the search box is a large part of the navbar problem. When you highlight all the floated elements on a page, you can see the div containing the search field and the Advanced Search link covers the entire navbar. It's set to absolute positioning, and padded something like 300px or so on the right. I tried setting the z-index to -1 to see if that would help, but even if that worked (which it didn't, oddly), it wouldn't have addressed the positioning issue.
Attachment 143908
One thing I didn't try was taking out all that padding on the right, and instead setting the margins to that same width. Again, a temp fix, but at least the links should have been clickable in webkit browsers. I'm not sure how that would have affected IE. The CSS class that controls the search box is
globalsearch. I believe it was in the
forumhome.css template.