*** Resolved *** Setting a value in a SELECT field

I THINK this is a bug, but not sure
I have a field where I set the value programatically.
I set it as text, and it works wonderfully

But some times the user needs to over ride it, so I need it to be a drop down/Select field
When I change it to this, the behaviour is weird.
when I programatically set value, the display field is sometimes wrong, or sometimes blank.
The drop down does show the correct list of values

In this example it should show the second value in the list, but it is blanks

Is there some special way to handle a situation like this, where