I want to eliminate the three rows of formating options from all my text entry forms and provide just a text box for the message. However, I cannot find any sign of this form in any of the files.

Has anyone ever made this modification?

It would be nice if using the fancy editor window was optional for all modules. Unfortunately it isn't.

What you need to do is change all occurances of

new XoopsFormDhtmlTextArea($caption, $name, $value, $rows, $cols)

to

new XoopsFormTextArea($caption, $name, $value, $rows, $cols)

This would be found not in the templates but in the module php files which define all the fields for the forms and typically handle submitted information.

I hope that helps and isn't beyond your skills. This would be a big hack if you have lots of modules using this form.