Vendor list issue

Dear experts,

We are on SRM5 - E Classic

We have set the status of vendor list as 'Not released' for one product category. Thus the user should not be able to raise SCs for this product category (as vendors won't be prompted for this category). This works fine except in the case where user creates a limit SC and plugs in the vendor from that vendor list directly instead of searching for it.

When the user plugs in the vendor, the system creates a SC but if user does a search help for vendors, no vendors are found.

Has anyone faced this issue/Any SAP notes for this issue?

Thanks