drupal theming

I recently worked on a project (based on Drupal 4.7 - but this technique works in Drupal 5 as well - more info at the end of this post) where I had to figure out the best way to assign unique icons to individual in menu within a Drupal block. As you may or may not know, in Drupal 4.7, items in item-lists are output without individual identifiers (class names or ids). This is problematic in that there is no way to the target each menu item.