You can do a lot of things:
- You can make it into a scrolling carousel (scrolls and wraps around)
- You can make it so it hide into the side (collapsable)
- You can copy what apple does and enlarge the area that you are hovering around (bubble effect).
- You can make selections flash twice before executing
- Animations (yes I know you said you included this) are a definite plus (make sure they don't eat away your resources and make it laggy though).
- If you use submenus, don't use the same old same old slide out or the such, make them rotate out (if you ever saw the movie Percy Jackson & The Olympians: Lightning Thief - The shield he gets starts off as a sliver, then spins open, quite nice).
Mainly, think about what you can do with the Adorner class, Animations, Rotation/Transform, Effects (WPF FX), etc. The "miscellaneous" stuff.