I often see requests for help on how to create a simple dropdown menu without requiring too much effort, and usually I direct people to an article for 'son of suckerfish', but since jQuery is in most sites I use now I have moved to using a jQuery based dropdown that is much simpler.
Sometimes you need Joomla to give you nothing but the components output. No template, no styling, nothing. Just the output. This article shows you how to do this, and tie it in with an Ajax call.