Hi Derek,
Take a look at Flexi as a starting point
Mary Evans and I are working on another theme which extends that but uses Mary's cafelite layout structure, with testing and help from William Ratto and I am working on a v2 of flexi which again extends the settings available but keeps base as a parent - the plan to be able to set much of the theme from inside moodle seems to be proving to be very popular
Out of interest, what themes have you come across with right placed menus? I haven't seen any like that other than a couple adapted specifically for websites using rtl languages
Richard