Ah I messed about with the menus panel a bit and managed to hide the default menu and build a new one.
however with this method I need to add links to the menu manually in the panel, rather than having them automatically appended…
maybe this is the only way to achieve what I want though?
EDIT: OK just spotted the option to automatically add top level pages, So I think thats me fixed! Yay! thanks for pointing me in the right direction Daris ??