Category menu: three simple problems

Dear Madam / Sir,

when I set up an Atahualpa Category menu it works fine on first glance.
But looking closer I found irritating things:

1) I have no control of the appearance of the active menu item.
(Yes I know, in some threads in this forum CSS-Code is shown,
but the active-method never works, neither for links nor for lists.)

2) I found no way to make the top category - lets call it "car" - to be
inert. That means if "car" has the sub menus "motor" and "color",
(and therefore the category "car" has the sub categories "motor"
and "color") I don't want to see all the posts in the category "car"
(there are none, only in the sub categories). So if I click on the
menu item "car" nothing should happen, but alas, it does: all the
post from the sub categories appear. What am I doing wrong?

3) Related to the problem above: How can I suppress the appearance
of all the posts from all of the sub categories if I click on the menu
item of the parent category (which in itself contains no posts)?

I'm using WordPress 3.1, Atahualpa 3.6.4 and as only Plugin "Blogroll
to Page" 1.0.0, PHP 5.3.5 and MySQL 5.5.9.

I would greatly appreciate your help,
Georg Huber