Thanks again, Acorn. I've done some tweaking in the meantime - started experimenting with the FixedTab tweak (I know a few contributed to the conversation back then, but I think this version was shared publicly by athman / Steve Ledger. Put together a basic homemade vertical navbar with it. I do lose mouse-over effects on the navbar doing this (the drawn elements), but the floating menu effect is nice. I'd be curious to know if there have been any further tweaks / developments in that area. For the moment, the site is improving a little bit at a time:

http://stronggroup.com/testhlv