It may not be possible, here's what I'm looking to do.

I want to have a vertical bar docked to the right side that autohides. This vertical bar is only large icons (32x32 or 48x48) with some kind of a square buttonish background for each icon/entry. There is some measure of transparent space between each icon/entry.

When a button is clicked I would like to have a horizontal menu flyout that again is only program icons on the same background with the same transparent space in between.

Is it possible to mix the h & v menus in this manner? I seem to get all one way or the other.

Is there a theme already using something like this?

What you are looking for is not a menu system - it's a dock with a built-in menu system, and a dock is something NextSTART, by design, isn't (although we do have a dock in the works for quite some time that would work exactly as you describe).

You can still somewhat work around this limitation by using hotspot buttons: create as many hotspot buttons as you want to have menus and then position them on the screen as you see fit (hotspot buttons are 'visible' hotspots that allow you to display icons of almost any size). To each hotspot button you then associate a menu you have previously created using the built-in Menu Editor.

Otherwise, have you tried WorkShelf already?

The always visible hotspots are where I have currently landed as a compromise.

I have installed workshelf and thought I found it lacking. Are you saying that in a vertical, docked configuration any given tab could have an icon / entry for a menu / folder that would fly out horizontally? All I could do was work within the same vertical bar.