I recently put together something vaguely like this for a client website. You can check out the effect at
http://kanesrestaurant.biz/menu/menureg.html . The JS and CSS aren't too heavy. I've tested the slide-in-slide-out effect on Safari, Firefox (Mac and Win), IE (Win, v6 and 7, 5.0 should be OK too). There are still a couple of bugs, but at this point they're pretty subtle. There are two things I like best about it: one, that adding another slide to the series is as easy as adding another div to the html and setting its class to "slide", and two, that I spent some time playing with various algorithms for the actual slide effect before settling on a logarithmic scale.
Overall site is (very) incomplete, and I've got a few too many projects at the moment, so be gentle.