proper operation of "standalone shell"?

[Robert P. J. Day]

  i was just reading the help for the "standalone shell" feature,
specifically:

"This option causes the selected busybox shell to use busybox applets
in preference to executables in the PATH whenever possible.  For
example, entering the command 'ifconfig' into the shell would
cause busybox to use the ifconfig busybox applet."

  now, to *me*, that suggests that if i *don't* configure the
standalone shell feature, then busybox will first check for a command
as a separate executable in my search path before looking for an
applet by that name, but that's pretty clearly not what's happening.

  (i tested this with a random applet, and busybox clearly tries to
run the applet of that name and not the existing external executable.)

  so ... how should i interpret what i'm reading up there?  or am i
doing something stupid?

rday