I noticed the same thing, I have a department filter and I want the first selection to be "All Departments" (basically, no filter). When the page loads, it was showing the first department instead of "All Departments" (even though "All Departments" is first in the list).
There is an embed "Start of "Option Filter & Order"" right before it loops through the Departments table and adds records to the drop list. I added this line of code there:
p_web.setsessionvalue('DPT:Description','All Departments')
and now it properly selects the first item in the list. Maybe something similar will work for you?