thank you for your message, Glenn.
https://www.vintage-adventures.com
yes, I did end up using negative text indent. Take a look. Turns out, when an image is used to lead in the bullet, the standard hanging indent feature of ULs is lost. Here is an excellent resource for list issues. http://www.alistapart.com/articles/taminglists.
so, what I did, was took out the stock Zen separators, and then applied positive padding and negative text indent to the top cat UL container inside of the overall UL container that could contain multiple top cat groupings. You really allowed for a lot of customization when you built this mod.
Leaving all bullet elements flush left, and using some color, I've got somewhat of a 'sliding' bullet menu now. The only downside I noticed is a difference in the number of pixels that FF uses between the bullet image and the first letter of text, which causes a slight difference in the amount of negative text-indent that would be needed for precision left-side flushness IE8 vs. FF. I tried to find a cross-browser solution to get the same left-side flush for both browsers, such as using 'outer' on the bullet and then pushing it all back in with margin or padding, but nothing else worked quite right, because I wanted the hyperlink area to go wall-to-wall inside the list, so what I've got is, I think, as close as I'm going to get.