Jeff,
I have not worked with the Flex eSearch widget since February, so I can recall what I did in the code but the widget is working properly for the way you have it configured. If you want that search button in your image to go away then change:
<multipartgraphicsearch>true</multipartgraphicsearch>
to false. And if you want buffering to show on the "Graphical" search tab then change:
<enablegraphicsbuffering>false</enablegraphicsbuffering>
to true. Not sure why your config.xml worked differently in the previous version.