How do I remove the active class in the main menu?
I had the same problem: the l() function automatically assigns an active class when a link is pointing to the current page.

I got around this using an (ugly) hack:

As noted in the documentation, $options['language'] is additionally compared with $language_url-&gt;language before assigning the active class.

So, the hack is to supply a deliberately incorrect language when calling l().

You can find out what the current language of your site is using dpm():

global $language_url;
dpm($language_url-&gt;language);


In my case, I know that the language of the site is definitely not und, so I appended array('language' =&gt; 'und') to my call to l():

l('link text', 'path/to/page', array('language' =&gt; 'und'))

After this, the a element no longer had the active class.