Vertical Suckerfish with slideout submenus

Vertical Suckerfish with slideout submenus

I am trying to capture a menu effect from the DotNetNuke core menus, found here:   http://www.toledooblates.org/

My test site is here:   http://www.repeatersolutions.org/

The suckerfish menus are no problem, I've used those on other sites and have used the superfish to accomplish the basics of what I need.  However, this is the first time I've really tried to animate - everything else was fade in and/or drop down.

My first line of attack was to try to use animate() to accomplish a slide out effect.  The closest I came is what you'll see in IE8 (the submenu slides out from the left edge and is visible the whole way across).

So, I switch to JQuery-UI and the slide animation, and used my own custom functions.  I'm now down to 2 problems:
  1. Animation queueing - the mouseout function fails to work properly if I mouseout before the animation is finished.
  2. The negative margin-top is messing with the display of the top 2em of the menu - the animation completes and then the top 2em show.
Any help with either of these problems would be greatly appreciated (especially if the help is in the form of pointing me towards a plugin that accomplishes everything I want).