Thanks Oleg… I've saved a lot of time over the past few months thanks to your contributions.
I just downloaded 4.3.2 and everything is working fine in Chrome, however I am still seeing this “undefined” text problem in Firefox (3.6) and IE (all).
My code has the change that you suggested. I haven't been able to fix it so I reverted back to an older version.
I downlowded the current version of jqGrid from the download page and see a lot of changes, bug fixes and new features made after the first publishing of jqGrid 4.3.2. Would be it not better to change the version number from 4.3.2 to 4.3.3? It will simplify the troubleshoting.
One more strange thing one can see: the files src\i18n\grid.locale-en.js and src\i18n\grid.locale-de.js are new, but the files js\i18n\grid.locale-en.js and js\i18n\grid.locale-en.js are still old. Probebly it would be nice to place in the js\i18n