Customize menu outside of DIV or Hika CSS

I'm new to the site and was unable to find my answer in the forum so please forgive the newbie question. I have created an Artisteer template for Joomla 1.6. I am testing which shopping cart to use and so far Hika seems to be well suited. My problem is that I have created a vertical menu style on the left side of my site and a few test categories and products in Hika. When I have them show in the vertical menu my created menu style which I created in Artisteer isn't being honored. The dimensions and header are but the category link content within is not. I have tested using images, links, DIV settings but nothing seems to work. Is there a way to list categories and products in a vertical menu while bypassing the Hika DIV settings or CSS so my previously created menu template is being used?

Thanks for your time.

Thanks for the quick reply. The site is at www.renditioninterior.com/site/

Right now the vertical menu at the left is set to list but as you can see something is wrong. Artisteer has me put an "art-vmenu" title into the suffix settings of the module to link up the template style. I'm a little unclear was to what the UL class suffix is. Any info on that would be greatly appreciated.

I set it to not display child elements and placed art-vmenu in the UL Class Name section. It changed the way the links look but still no button style. I've uploaded the Joomla template if it helps.

Made the changes and made the UL suffix was set to art-vmenu...attached the new css I used.

Sorry for all the questions but I really want to make this work.

Thanks for your help.

Got it. Do you know if I will be able to show the products under the categories in the vertical menu? For example the menu contains the category of Bookcases, when someone clicks on it the menu bar would roll down the associated products according to that category. That's how I had planned on it working but with disabling child sub-categories I am thinking that it won't be possible.

Thanks for your help, that got me pretty close. I saw this being done on your demo site www.demo.hikashop.com/ but is this because of the "child elements"?