At this point, it appears that this functionality does not exist and I have only two options for menu selection:
1) Post a user message for the user to make the menu selection
2) Try and find the locations of the menu/submenu items, perform a series of move cursor, mouse down and mouse up in order to force the menu selection.
Again the goal is to be able to get some automated regression testing capability in place for a very large system (including hundreds of panels). Other programs use the same large LabVIEW application with later LabVIEW verisions and they have a great Perl scripted capability which unfortunately cannot be used for the LabVIEW 7.1 version.