Concern

It’s kind of an obvious hack, but to “disable” the translucent menu bar in Mac OS X 10.5, you can just change your desktop background to have a little strip of a solid color (or a gradient) along the top.

Now you could pay for an image editor, or wait until the Gimp works again on Leopard, or five-finger bittorrent a copy of Photoshop, but it’s easier to just install ImageMagick (through MacPorts), and do it as a batch.

I have a folder of pictures, all the right size (1920 by 1200 pixels), that I use for desktop pictures; I made a little gradient image, and then let mogrify do the work:

rigel:~/Pictures$ mkdir "Backup of Desktop Pictures"
rigel:~/Pictures$ cp Desktop\ Pictures/* Backup\ of\ Desktop\ Pictures
rigel:~/Pictures$ cp gradient-menu.jpg Desktop\ Pictures
rigel:~/Pictures$ cd Desktop\ Pictures
rigel:~/Pictures/Desktop Pictures$ for file in *.jpg
> do mogrify -draw 'image Over 0,0 1920,22 gradient-menu.jpg' "$file"
> done
rigel:~/Pictures/Desktop Pictures$ rm gradient-menu.jpg