OK, I have this somewhat sorted out by adding additional menus.

I now have the main horizontal menu and a vertical menu that I assign level attribute to, I then add a third vertical menu in another row below.

The top vertical menu I can assign Level=same and the bottom vertial menu assign level=child. It all works good excelpt for one thing, there is a stray table row created at the bottom of each vertical menu. This causes a seperation between the two menus. There is NOTHING in the skin that would do this

<tr><td>Vertmenu1</td></tr>
<tr><td>Vertmenu2</td></tr>

When you view the page source it's not there either, it must be something generated by the menu?

The space generated is not nearly as wide in FF as it is in IE.