Rob,
I mimicked the top of the WebAssist site (because I liked it so much) for a radio station site I built recently that did use the HTML dropdowns (although I did not make my dropdowns quite as large. I actually did it using WebAssist's CSS Menu Writer and then making some slight modifications to the code... you can see it here: index.php
Let me know if you need a hand in getting it started and I can look through my style sheets to let you know how to accomplish it.
Regards,
Brian