I'm using the printAlbumMenu plugin, and I'm wondering if there's any way to deactivate the top album link for an album that contains subalbums. I currently have all my links set to go to the first image of each album, but the albums that contain subalbums have no images of their own; they then link to a gallery page of the subalbums. I'd rather the user avoid the album pages altogether, so I'm looking for a way to deactivate the link to a subalbum's top album.

You could try the "omit-top" parameter:
http://www.zenphoto.org/documentation/plugins/_zp-extensions---print_album_menu.php.html#functionprintAlbumMenu

If that does not what you want you will have to code your custom menu list. In that case I suggest to get familiar with the object model framework (see the tutorial on the user guide).

I want the top album names to appear, just not as links. Thanks for the tip, though—I'll look into the user guide.

Sorry, in that case you need to either modify the plugin or code your own album list (the latter is probably a little easier if I get your purpose correctly).