Steven Zahm@ John
1/. Sorry, nothing officially supported. However, see this support topic reply. It offers a method that can be used to enable this.
2/. The issue is that, likely the theme, has included an HTML shim script. The purpose of these shim scripts is to enable HTML5 features in browsers that do not support them. They work pretty well … but, there seems to be a bug in this shim script.
When you click on a category, the “Search” placeholder string in the search box is being sent too. So you’re actually searching for “Search” within the category being clicked. Obviously not what we want to do.
The fix will be to remove the “Search” placeholder text. To do this easily, we can use another plugin.
Changing the search string can be done with the Say What? plugin.
It’ll add a new Text Changes menu item. Click Add New, enter the string exactly as shown in Connections, Search. Next enter connections [notice the lack of capitalization, that's important!] as the domain and then enter your new text. The new text you want to add will be nothing, leave it blank. That should fix it.
Hope that helps!