Navbar customization questions

[tcarr9]

I've been looking all through the various style vars and can't get anything that will let me change these two things in the nav bar. See the attached screenshot.

1. When I hover over one of the normal nav bar links it works great. When I hover over one of the ones that is a drop down, the background for that section of the nav bar changes color to the SAME color as the link color, so that I can't see the link any more. I don't mind the background changing color but I need to be able to specify a contrasting color for the text on it.

2. I would like the search box to either be taller or better centered. I've tried changing navbarsearch_padding and searchbox_size's height, but neither of them seem to do anything at all as far as I can tell.

Any advice would be greatly appreciated. Thanks in advance!