Peter Dempsey wrote:
> 
> [Hopefully I'm wrong or this has already been covered...]
> 
> Before going any further I will pose the question summarized in the title:
> When creating a beveled button in OS X with a value above zero does the
> button become a drop-down menu button with a menu ID of the initial value?
> If so, I didn't see that anywhere in the manual and the rest of this is
> somewhat irrelevant.

Peter,

From the Reference Manual (Appearance Button):

Pop-Up Menus:
There are two distinct types of pop-up menus: beveled, and standard.
Both are valid types
and the particular use of one over the other is something that should
be guided by your
individual application and by Apple's Human Interface Guide Lines.
Beveled buttons are
created as follows:
APPEARANCE BUTTON bRef,_activeBtn,menuID,0,1,¬
"Bevel+_kControlBevelButtonMenuOnRight", ¬
@r,_kControlBevelButtonSmallBevelProc +  ¬
_kControlBevelButtonMenuOnRight
When bevel-button menus are created, the initial value for the control
is the resource ID
number of the menu. Three specific BUTTON function commands may be
used to extract
information from the control.
handle       = BUTTON(bRef, _FBgetBevelControlMenuHandle)
currentItem  = BUTTON(bRef, _FBgetBevelControlMenuVal)
previousItem = BUTTON(bRef, _FBgetBevelControlLastMenu)
-- 
Cheers,

Alain