Hi,

The main point about skinning is that you can do just about anything you can conceive.  So the answer is a definite yes. I chose to buy a third party menu (off snowcovered.com) it has more options than you can shake a stick at.  Vertical menus, in a stack of styles, is one of them.

The footer menu comes from one of the optional (ie rip it out if you don't like it) skin objects.  AIUI early menus were not very SEO friendly because they used Javascript to navigate between the pages.  Search engines don't process JS so the engine could not find out about other pages in the site.  That footer renders real anchor links so that the search engine can learn about the structure of the site.  If you buy (or write) a 'more modern' menu it will normally render real links too.  That makes the footer menu redundant from the SEO POV - although if you like it of course you can keep it.

1.  I guess "default menu" is part of the skinning process.  I guess I will delve deeper into making skins.

2.  The footer menu is the text menu appearing across the bottom of the page.  Is it possible to have different links in the footer menu vs the links in the primary menu.