Oooh, another feature that would be great would be no-scroll objects, such as text, shapes, etc. This way, the content of the page could scroll past fixed or no-scroll objects such as the text links along the left side of the page.

I know I can achieve this with iFrames, but I have read that search engine crawlers don't favor objects such as iframes? Also it add another scroll bar that may confuse the visitor.

The usual way to do these menus is via an i-frame. You have the extra scroll bar only if the page you are displaying is too big to fit in the frame.

Re the search engine crawlers: If you put your i-frame pages in a site map, the crawlers should have no trouble finding them, and the links they contain.

I'm not sure that no-scroll objects are even possible in straight html code. I have seen annoying Javascripts that insist in scrolling ads down the page as you scroll -- so I am sure a Javascript solution is possible. But if people have Javascript disabled (to avoid the annoying ads!) they might miss your menu altogether. Also Javascript is not search-engine friendly.