Replace the huge project selection in issue submission with something more efficient

When submitting any issue or follow-up on this site, the form includes a drop-down to select a project to attach the issue to. This drop-down menu is only ever used when moving issues between projects, or when submitting a new issue without having used one of the project-specific links from a project page.

The menu, owing to the prodigious number of projects hosted here, is extremely huge. On my over-burdened old notebook, even Firefox 3 stops the page-building for up to a minute while this long menu is rendered. The dial-up connection probably doesn't help.

I admit that my slow computer is an edge case, but I wonder if the situation could be improved. For example, the project menu could be dynamically loaded only if required by the user - or it could be turned into an autocomplete field. Either of these would admittedly pose some challenge to gracefully degrade from, but it's worth some thought at least.