I was just thinking of a way to archieve this when I came across your topic. Obviously I would be intrested in more of your changes to the code, and maybe some others as well.
However, I'd like to see this as an future option in jqGrid. The exact same argument on why the OP wanted to archieve this can be applied to my company.
If I read you correctly, you should be able to achieve the desired effect without needing to alter jqgrid's code by adding an afterEditCell event handler.
afterEditCell: function afterEditCell(rowID, cellname, value, iRow, iCol) {
Thanks. As you said we should provide mechanisms and not ready solutions. Let say that after some time another user want that they want not to select a value