box select in the dope sheet vs action editor

Been using blender since 2.57, and up till recently mostly used the action editor when animating. but now I’m using key frames from nodes and shape keys and materials etc, so I need to use the dope sheet. But the box select is behaving strangely! Could someone possibly explain to me why the box select works differently in the dope sheet than it does in the action editor. When I try to box select a vertical row of key frames it won’t select the whole row, and sometimes when I try to box select a cluster of key frames only some of them get selected and others that I didn’t even want to select that weren’t part of the cluster get selected. I end up having to select a whole bunch of key frames one by one, which is a real pain! Yet these same selection tasks on the same key frames are executed with no problem in the action editor. What gives? How does the box select work in the dope sheet?