Button add to cart not working when form closed for ajax search

Small easy project I have ajax search suggest field in the top of [login to view URL] in oscommerce. Part of the code had </form> to close the form, but this made the add to cart button stop working in IE7. So I removed the </form> from the code and its working fine. But now I want to add autocomplete="off" inside the form field. But autocomplete="off" dot work unless the </form> tag is at the end. I need the autocomplete="off" and add to cart both working in all browsers. Ive tried putting the </form> at various places in the code. Small budget please this is not a large project to work on. Project will go to service provider who can fix with smallest budget in fastest time.