Hey I'm so embarrassed.. There was actually nothing wrong with the plug-in, just had it launching the wrong skin file, instead of the main one I had it going to the search field one straight away. Hence why it worked with the other skin, it was simply my basichome.xml was pointing to the wrong source.
Funny enough though, the plug-in has been going great, but then I upgraded to the latest SVN and it is now dead, I can definitely verify this, I have gone back and forward between SVN's and it definately stops working on the most recent one.