Change to VARHCAR Behavior

Does anyone know of a db setting to change the VARCHAR behavior back for chopping the spaces at the end of the string?  I read the notes that indicate....

As of MySQL 5.0.3, trailing spaces are retained when values are stored and retrieved, in conformance with standard SQL.

This is painful in an app where a user is looking for a string using a equals and the spaces causes the record not to be retrieved.

Thanks,


Melissa