Your Leopard menu bar no longer has to be translucent.
One of the things some Leopard users complained about on the initial release of Leopard was the translucent menu bar. Rather than appear at the top of the screen like a plain white (or gray) bar, it now showed the desktop image through it. People with extremely “busy” desktop images found it difficult to read the menu bar.
Here’s an example of the standard, translucent menu bar with the Bamboo Grove desktop picture. I don’t think it looks so bad.
(I kind of like the way the translucent menu bar looks. But then again, I don’t like “busy” desktop images.)
In Mac OS X 10.5.2, the recent Leopard update, Apple added a new setting in the Desktop panel of the Desktop & Screen Saver preferences pane: Translucent Menu Bar. Turning this check box off removes menu bar translucency, returning the menu bar to a plain gray, Tiger-like menu bar.
Here’s what the same menu looks like with the Translucent Menu Bar option turned off.
Oh, and you may not have noticed this at all, but the menus, which are also translucent, are now a little less translucent than they were in the original Leopard release.
Page References
You can learn more about setting Desktop options on pages 166-167 of Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard: Visual QuickStart Guide.
I think the Translucent Menu Bar option only appears when translucency is supported by the Mac. On my iMac G4 and my 12″ PowerBook, I don’t get this option with 10.5.2.