Displaying the navigation menu as a menu bar

Hi,

I'm trying to tune my theme to make it display the user navigation menu as a menu bar thanks to the method described there : http://www.htmldog.com/articles/suckerfish/dropdowns/
I've already managed to isolate the navigation menu by calling print(theme('menu_tree')); from page.tpl.php at the place where I want to display the menu bar and with the CSS and Javascript described in the article on suckerfish it should be OK.
But I still miss something to link the two : I need the menu to always be fully expanded because menu items won't be expanded through a request on the server but through a client javascript CSS update.
To illustrate what I'm saying, for now initially I have something like that :

<ul>
<li class="collapsed"><a href="/?q=node/add">create content</a></li>
<li class="leaf"><a href="/?q=usertags/1">my tags</a></li>
<li class="collapsed"><a href="/?q=project">projects</a></li>
<li class="leaf"><a href="/?q=user/1">my account</a></li>
<li class="leaf"><a href="/?q=tracker">recent posts</a></li>

<li class="leaf"><a href="/?q=queue">submission queue</a></li>
<li class="collapsed"><a href="/?q=aggregator">news aggregator</a></li>
<li class="collapsed"><a href="/?q=admin">administer</a></li>
<li class="leaf"><a href="/?q=logout">log out</a></li>

</ul>

And when I click on... let's say "projects", the projects section is opened and I get the following menu structure :

<ul>
<li class="collapsed"><a href="/?q=node/add">create content</a></li>
<li class="leaf"><a href="/?q=usertags/1">my tags</a></li>
<li class="expanded"><a href="/?q=project" class="active">projects</a>
<ul>
<li class="collapsed"><a href="/?q=project/issues">issues</a></li>
<li class="leaf"><a href="/?q=project/user">my projects</a></li>

</ul>
</li>

<li class="leaf"><a href="/?q=user/1">my account</a></li>
<li class="leaf"><a href="/?q=tracker">recent posts</a></li>
<li class="leaf"><a href="/?q=queue">submission queue</a></li>
<li class="collapsed"><a href="/?q=aggregator">news aggregator</a></li>
<li class="collapsed"><a href="/?q=admin">administer</a></li>
<li class="leaf"><a href="/?q=logout">log out</a></li>

</ul>

What I would like to achieve is to get the whole menu structure as if the whole tree was expanded. I'm aware of the "expanded" checkbox in menu configuration section but I don't want to get there and set this parameter to true everytime a new menu item is added because I've installed a module or something. So I think there is something to tweak in menu.inc, maybe a parameter to add to make it possible to expand the whole tree somewhere. But I have trouble understanding the menu system alone.

I hope I am clear enough about what I try to achieve and I hope it's feasible because it would really make the administration task more... well easier. Any ideas ?

Thx in advance.
::
daneel