MacOSX 10.5 added some bling, possibly to "catch up" with Vista. The transparent menu bar sucks. Completely. Please, someone at Apple, fix this.
I've got my desktop picture set to cycle through some of my photographs. Most of the time, it's not a big deal, but occasionally, one comes up that causes my menu bar to look like this:
Seriously.
Yes, transparency is cool. It's great to show off the power of the UI renderer, etc... But not at the sake of readability.