Opaque Leopard menubar solved

The only background I saw that looked horrible on the new menu bar was a black and white checker box pattern. No one uses that as their background. This really seems much adieu about nothing.

Quick Q: If 1 gives you blinding white and 0 gives you dark grey and 0.62 gives you perfect gradient, what gives you the translucency back?

I mean, I don't much mind the translucency... On my current background, but it might one day irk me. What would I do to undo this "customization?"

I like the translucent menu bar; I haven't had any problem reading menu items, etc. through it. I tried this plist trick for the sake of trying it. My wife is "unsure" of the new menu so I wanted to give her another option, I'll be putting my system back to normal though.

@39, Alex El. I also screwed up (I renamed the file incorrectly, multiple times (not paying enough attention I guess)). For everyone else, make sure the extra code is placed before the last "" lines. Owner should also be root:wheel 644. I didn't have to use single user mode as I have Tiger on a separate partition, but man.. annoying. There should be a bit more clarification in this post about this. If an innocent users makes a mistake on their only bootable partition, they might be seriously lost.

@41

Transparency is a problem for me because I use the very cool rotate desktop picture feature. I have a large collection of photos that I am continuously adding to. The transparent menu bar looks really cool with some but it looks like complete crap with others. With some the text is almost unreadable. These two features don't always play nicely together. I am hoping that Apple will make shutting off transparency an option in the near future.

@36 & @40 - nobody says you can't do it, but you should try for a second to quit trying to BREAK your stuff. Maybe give a bit to see what the designers had in mind, and maybe (just maybe!) you could spend your time being productive with your computer instead of looking for that next great hack!

@41

Translucency is a problem for people who don't like the look of it.

The menu bar is always visible - for the folks who don't like the look of the translucent menu bar that makes it a problem.

Thanks to the hard work of a few folks, people now have a choice.

I, for one, didn't like the translucent menu bar. I didn't complain, not even once, but I used this tweak and now, I am no much happier with the look of my menu bar.

Just because Apple designed and shipped Leopard, doesn't mean everyone has to like everything about it.

Why is all this so hard for others to understand?

Tell me again why the translucency is a "problem" that needs "solved"?

Well, after a bunch of messing around, restoring my backed-up backup copy eventually got everything to work.

Phew.

Well, i'm the stupid guy who messed w/ the com.apple.WindowServer.plist file and managed to eff everything up. I did, however, copy an original version of the file to my desktop in case of bad news (more about that later).

After the changes, my MBP hung on startup. I booted in Single User Mode, moved the original back into the System/Library/LaunchDaemons/ folder and restarted ... still hung on startup.

I mounted my drive and ran fsck -y, no changes.

I removed the com.apple.windowserver file (made backup) and a com.apple.windowserver.XXXXXX.plist file (also made a backup). Then rebooted and cleared the PRAM for startup ... no changes.

I'm at a loss here. Will repairing permissions even make a difference? I've put the backup copy back in /LaunchDaemons/ and am leaving it alone for now.

Basically, praying for someone who is obviously better than me in the terminal to bail me out.

@Scott: "But I have better things to do with my time than twiddle with bits. If I didn't, I'd have a Windows PC at home."

You say that, and yet you've got enough time on your hands to slag people who do want to change their system settings. Methinks you doth protest too much.