I would like to completely remove menu bar with categories - can I simply turn it off? cheers

yes you can. look at the header options

Well, im in "category menu bar" and do not see it...

Style & edit HEADER AREA...NOT category menu bar

Thanks! Im really new to WP and this theme, but will stick to it!

Hi, first of all - thanks, Atahualpa is nice theme. However I wanted to start from a single page layout, so I've started disabling most things (so I could enable them later when I have content). I have noticed, that actually - if I remove %pages or %cats from the string "%logo %pages %cats" in v.3.5.1 or 3.5.3 (Style & edit HEADER AREA -> Configure Header Area), menu texts disappear, but both grey menu-bars are still there.

How can I disable/hide menu bars completely?

I've tested on Google Chrome 5 and IE 8.
BTW, IE shows an error at the page load:

Webpage error details

User Agent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 8.0; Windows NT 6.0; Trident/4.0; SLCC1; .NET CLR 2.0.50727; InfoPath.2; .NET CLR 1.1.4322; .NET CLR 3.5.21022; .NET CLR 3.5.30729; .NET CLR 3.0.30729; .NET4.0C; .NET4.0E)
Timestamp: Fri, 13 Aug 2010 15:26:11 UTC


Message: 'self.css(...)' is null or not an object
Line: 134
Char: 3
Code: 0
URI: [...]/wp-content/themes/atahualpa353/js/jquery.cross-slide.js

Those gray bars are a background image.