visual menu breadcrumbs?

hi all -
long time listener, first time caller.
i have a question about my options for achieving visual breadcrumbing using Joomla 1.0x. i've been using joomla for months with little problems - i have used deep pockets to create categories that act as my pages/"content", and simply manually link joomla menu items to deep pockets categories for each page. it's a pain to build, yes, but it's been easy for ppl editing pages to find the content they need to edit.

what i am presently doing is using horizontal menu modules modified with CSS to appear vertical(wrapping the menu items with flow styles via the master template CSS), and aligning those modules up horizontally (CSS flow within a position called "nav") to create a row of column menus and submenus. the proper menus are explicitly told to show up on each page via the menu module configuration screen. right now it looks, when someone clicks on Profile, then Who, then Team, like this:
Home Who director
Profile What team
Projects Where faculty
Contact
because the main, the "profile" and the 'who" menu modules are explicitly told to appear on viewing the categories "who", "director", "team" and "faculty". you get the idea.
these menu and sub menu modules are a pain to maintain, but to achieve the desired graphical effect, it was the only thing we could think of. the tree is at its deepest about 6 levels deep i think - hence deep pockets.

what i an going for is a visual breadcrumb path that will appear across a row of vertical menus (or, preferably, horizontal menus modified with css) - that looks a bit something like this when someone clicks on Profile, then Who, then Team:
Home Who director
Profile What team
Projects Where faculty
Contact

basically, where the user can somehow tell that to get to the page he's looking at, he has clicked the following links. (unfortunately a separate breadcrumb Profile>Who>Team apart from the menu system will not work for us - we need the visual integration with the menu modules.)

i have not seen a working example of a menu system like this with joomla anywhere on the internet, but i can't imagine it isn't possible.... i am willing to try anything, from CSS hacks to templating up to and including ripping out the entire menu system and starting over if need be (it is the visual design that matters to us)...whatever you think would achieve this best (though of course, the sooner i can implement a solution the better - the boss is on me for this one. ;-))
any advice or pointers you can give on this matter would be greatly appreciated. thanks so much for whatever insight you can give, and have a great day.

-sol