I guess I agree about the danger and so retract my solution #1. I'm still interested in #2 however, since your (nice) drag and drop trick (which Hue-Bond also suggested to me) solves opening in the same window but doesn't solve the part I need of opening in a frame in the same window.

Oh my gosh! You gave me an idea that solves the problem (on my browser at least) : drag a link from the chat, private messages, or other users frames and drop it into the search box and hit enter ... voila the links from the other frames open in wherever the search is targeted for.