<p>Uhm I'm not sure if anyone has encountered this problem <br>
a brief description is on IE6 any <code>&lt;select&gt;</code> objects get displayed over any other item, even div's... meaning if you have a fancy javascript effect that displays a div that's supposed to be on top of everything (e.g: lightbox, multibox etc..) onclick of a certain element and that div overlaps a <code>&lt;select&gt;</code> your div get's to be displayed as if it's under the <code>&lt;select&gt;</code> [on this case a max and minimum z-index doesn't work ]</p>

<p>I've tried googling and found the iframe shim solution <br>
but I wanted some pretty clean alternatives
or better yet has anyone found a better solution?
since the method using iframes uses around 130mb of ram might slow down poor people's machines</p>

Prior to IE7 the drop down list was a "windowed" control meaning that it was rendered as a control directly by Windows rather than the browser synthesizing it. As such, it wasn't possible for it to support z-indexing against other synthesized controls.
In order to appear over a DDL, you must use another windowed control, like IFRAME. You can also use a little known IE-only feature called window.createPopup() which essentially makes a chromeless popup. It has limitations, like unstoppable click-out, but they are actually kinda helpful if you are building a hover menu system.