Holy crap I got it. I spent WAYYYYYYY too much time on this, only gonna charge client half of hours though because I had no idea vb5 was going to be so crazy. Anyway, for those looking, here's the solution.
1) remove the <option value="">{vb

hrase select}</option> in the registration widget template
2) edit signup.js
3) once signup.js is in your editor do a (I use notepad++) search for "change(" ... find the closing parenthesis and put ).change() on it. BOOM! All good to go homie.