I don't want to go into a lot of detail as to why, but suffice to say, I detest autocomplete, anywhere, in any form. I'll leave it at that and save the venting for another time.

Now, I've disabled autocomplete within a document, that's not too hard, by disabling the "Enable word completion." But, that seems to have no effect on the "Find & Replace" box.

Googling doesn't seem to find anything, except another person that also seems to hate it on the OpenOffice message boards, and they were not helpful. That was also about five years ago, if that makes any difference.

I know this sounds like a small thing, and I know this might sound a little crazy, but I find it absolutely infuriating.

Not the same thing, but you must have tried the word completion tab under Tools-->AutoCorrect Options.

Yes, I have both "Enable word completion" and "Collect words" disabled. But that doesn't seem to affect it.