Strange issue with CREATE OPERATOR CLASS

All,

I've been working on some scripts (for pgfoundry) which help in 
"cleaning up" databases which have TSearch and other contrib modules 
installed to schema public.  However, I ran into this odd issue:

ERROR:  btree operators must return boolean
STATEMENT:  CREATE OPERATOR CLASS contrib.tsquery_ops    DEFAULT FOR TYPE tsquery USING btree AS    OPERATOR 1
<(tsquery,tsquery),    OPERATOR 2 <=(tsquery,tsquery) ,    OPERATOR 3 =(tsquery,tsquery) ,    OPERATOR 4
>=(tsquery,tsquery),    OPERATOR 5 >(tsquery,tsquery) ,    FUNCTION 1 tsquery_cmp(tsquery,tsquery);
 

What appears to be happening there is that PG isn't finding the tsearch 
operators or is selecting the wrong operators.  Manually changing the 
search_path to "contrib, public" instead of "public, contrib" fixes the 
issue, but it seems odd that create opclass can't find operators unless 
they're in the "first" schema in the path, when other CREATE statements 
have no such difficulty.

--Josh