one more note - the navigation i'm working on at the moment will not change for the site (and i'm not worried about reusability at the moment), so i'm perfectly fine with putting in a series of calls such as this if it works (purposely not written in code):
* give me menu from node 2 and children
* give me menu from node 5 and children

etc.  totally unreusable but will work for this case and when I have more time to get a deeper understanding of how all this is working i'd learn to do it right. 
so whether i can get a nested array of the primary links and their children as i was trying to get below or simply get a series of arrays of the children of photo gallery, the children of floor plans etc doesn't matter to me at the moment - i can work with either.



sander-martijn wrote: 
yeah, tried that too but i'm still not understanding something.  No 
matter what I put in that (tried a variety of options in case i was 
misunderstanding what the args do) I either get just the top level or I 
get nothing:


menu_primary_links()
Array
(
    [menu-1-1-2] => Array
        (
            [title] => Photo Gallery
            [href] => node/2
            [attributes] => Array
                (
                )

        )

    [menu-1-2-2] => Array
        (
            [title] => Floor Plans
            [href] => node/5
            [attributes] => Array
                (
                )

        )

)
menu_primary_links(1)
Array
(
    [menu-1-1-2] => Array
        (
            [title] => Photo Gallery
            [href] => node/2
            [attributes] => Array
                (
                )

        )

    [menu-1-2-2] => Array
        (
            [title] => Floor Plans
            [href] => node/5
            [attributes] => Array
                (
                )

        )

)
menu_primary_links(2)
menu_primary_links(1,2)
Array
(
    [menu-1-1-2] => Array
        (
            [title] => Photo Gallery
            [href] => node/2
            [attributes] => Array
                (
                )

        )

    [menu-1-2-2] => Array
        (
            [title] => Floor Plans
            [href] => node/5
            [attributes] => Array
                (
                )

        )

)
menu_primary_links(2,1)
Array
(
)



Eric Mckenna wrote:
  
Heh.. sorry about that.  I didn't read you email close enough.  One 
thing that might help is that you can use menu_primary_links() , 
http://api.drupal.org/api/function/menu_primary_links/5,
to get the children.

  
    
trimming thread, it's getting long

--

sander-martijn
interface developer | architect
sander@sander-martijn.com
www.sander-martijn.com