Thanks for the vizinfo and vizmenu feedback. 
1. How would you like to modify the panel at it's creation? Perhaps you can get the underlying panel using 
InfoPanel.getPanel() and call one of its methods.
8. Take a look at our 
vizpopup documentation for an example of windows style pop-up menu.
In case its useful, there are other GUI libraries (e.g PyQt, wxPython) available as python add-ons. Installation and basic examples are provided in the our Knowledge Base 
Addons section.