How to associate a node with a menu without adding it to the menu Since menus drive the breadcrumbs by default in Drupal, is there a way to associate a node with a menu without actually adding it to the menu?  I am trying to maintain a concise menu that nodes can be associated with on the node edit page, without having every node that I associate with the menu then becoming yet another item in an ever growing menu tree.
I am not exactly sure of what you are trying to accomplish here, but it sounds like you are trying to use menus to alter the breadcrumb behavior

If that's the case, you should try the menu breadcrumb module - http://drupal.org/project/menu_breadcrumb or the custom breadcrumb module - http://drupal.org/project/custom_breadcrumbs

Hope this helps