A quick update on the issue: jqGrid doesn't re-sort the options if they are passed to editoptions as a string (i.e., in the example above, value:”:;8:ACME Inc.;3:Basic, LLC;7:Large Corp;2:Simple Organization;4:Testing Organization”).

EDIT: Unfortunately, there is no way to escape colon characters when using the string method, so you can't use any options with a colon in them. Since the object notation is the only way to allow all characters, I would consider the sorting bug to be a major issue.

EDIT 2: The bug with object sorting is apparently inherent to the javascript object implementation: Javascript Object Property Order. Would it be possible to switch over to using a pair of arrays (one for keys, one for values) to support a non-string notation that still allows explicit sorting?

EDIT 3: I just found out that there is undocumented support for custom “delimiter” and “separator” options for the string notation model. Is there a reason they're not included in the wiki documentation, or was that an oversight?