Sidebar menu background & text color

Hi folks,

I'm having trouble getting a left menu to do what the designer created and the client signed off.

It should be fairly straightforward and I had it working fine on a test page - then when I dropped it into the theme (Atahualpa 3.5.1) the xhtml 1.0 snuffed it.

Here's the spec:


top level menu items
plain text, color 001a49, background C3C9D4. On hover/mouseover, text color is white with background 001a49. No bullets.

sub menu items
plain text, color 001a49, background e6e6e6, with disc bullet matching text color. On hover/mouseover, text color is white with background 001a49, again with disc bullet.

I don't mind doing a brute force hack if I need to. Of course it would be nice if it played well with the theme. But I'm probably going to have to do some php if/then statements on it anyway, as they only want to show the sub menus once you're on the pages that have them.

Anyone have brilliant ideas or suggestions on this? Or direct me to a tutorial that'll allow me to do this for xhtml 1.0 transitional? (I've looked at a lot of tutorials this week, but they steered me wrong!)

Thanks in advance!