custom menu/sub-menu output what would i have to do to change the menu output structure for my theme?

this is the current structure:

&lt;ul class="menu"&gt;                                //menu
  &lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=""&gt;Home&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;
  &lt;li&gt;
    &lt;a href=""&gt;Other Stuff&lt;/a&gt;
    &lt;ul class="menu"&gt;                            // sub-menu
      &lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=""&gt;Sub-Page 1&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;
      &lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=""&gt;Sub-Page 1&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;
    &lt;/ul&gt;
  &lt;/li&gt;
&lt;/ul&gt;


what i would like to get is something like that:

&lt;ul class="menu"&gt;
    &lt;li&gt;&lt;a href="#"&gt;Home&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;
    &lt;li&gt;
        &lt;a href="#" class="drop"&gt;Other Stuff&lt;/a&gt;  // the 'drop' class is for the styling of a menu item with child-items
        &lt;div class="dropdown_1column"&gt;
            &lt;div class="col_1"&gt;
            &lt;a href=""&gt;Sub-Page 1&lt;/a&gt;
            &lt;a href=""&gt;Sub-Page 2&lt;/a&gt;
            &lt;/div&gt;
        &lt;/div&gt;
    &lt;/li&gt;
&lt;/ul&gt;
Do you know of the nice menus module?  Nice menus will allow you to make dropdown menus without writing any code on your own.  You can also find instructions for customizing the Nice menus CSS here.

Nice menus has almost 60,000 installs as of this writing, indicating that it is likely to be supported well into the future compared to modules that aren't so popular.