Navbar influencing page rank?

I have heard that including an attractive navbar, especially with graphics, hurts your page-rank because the spiderbot has to work through the navbar code before it gets to any content. 1st question: Is there anything to this? If "yes" then 2nd question: Is there a programming technique that will place the navbar code near the bottom of the page so that it gets crawled after the bot crawls the content text? (If I were programming in Pascal, I'd define a procedure, call it at the top, but place the code at the bottom. But I don't think that would work in HTML.)

1. No
2. CSS

I do use a style sheet to apply the navbar to the 77 separate pages in my site. But, when I look at the source code, all the navbar code appears above any of the pages' content. Are we sure that the spiderbot doesn't give up before it works through the navbar code, or, at least, ranks my site lower because it encounters so much content-less code?

Remember that Googlebot doesn't see a page visually like a browser does. It reads the HTML source and takes it in order. So as long as your navbar source is at the bottom, it doesn't matter where it appears on your page visually.

PageRank is related to inbound links, not the crawlability of your website.

As FogHorn says, you can use CSS to manipulate elements on your webpages.