Stumped. Totally... (but There Must Be A Way!?)

Hi there...

I am having a whole bunch of trouble trying to design a certain query. I
have two tables (see a representation of them here:
http://www.plankmeister.org.uk/tables.html ) one called menu_data and one
called page_data.

menu_data contains a list of defined menus (menu_group) which may be sorted
according to the menu_group_display_order column.

page_data contains a list of page definitions. Each page belongs to a
menu_group. All the pages in a given group may be sorted according to the
page_display_order column. (for instance, a query to order all pages with a
menu_group equal to 1 in ascending order would produce:
Cats
Dogs
Fish
Squirrels)

What I am trying to do is to design a query that will tell me the
page_user_name of all the pages that sit at the 'top' of their menu group,
but ordered by the menu_group_display_order column.
So basically, it will order the data in menu_data by the
menu_group_display_order colum, then comparing menu_data.menu_group to
page_data.menu_group, will return the 'first' row after being ordered by
page_display_order, so that in the case of the data given, the return would
be:

Horses
Cats
Birds
Rabbits


I've tried UNION, GROUP BY, TOP 1, INNER JOIN, OUTER JOIN, SLIGHTLY TO THE
LEFT JOIN, ONLY IF ITS A WEDNESDAY JOIN... etc etc... But I just can't get
it to work! It either returns 40 rows, or one. I've spent a total of about
10 hours trying to design this query, and am losing what precious little
hair I have left at an alarming rate.

Hope someone can provide some insight!

Plankmeister.