Update: The 10.5.2 Update now lets you control the Translucent Menu Bar in the Desktop system preference pane so there’s no need to hack your System file anymore.
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If you’re like me, you love Apple’s latest operating system, Leopard, but one of the quirks is the new translucent menu bar, which reveals your background photo through it, making menu items a little difficult to read.

Steve Miner has posted a tip that involves changing an environment variable by editing a plist to make Leopard think it’s running on an older Mac that doesn’t support the translucency. Once done, it will make your menubar solid white:

This tip is only for experts who understand the risks of editing system config files. (Obviously, this is not approved by Apple.) By the way, make sure you preserve the permissions on this file.

Edit the following file:
/System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.WindowServer.plist

Add an entry like this:

EnvironmentVariables

CI_NO_BACKGROUND_IMAGE
1

Restart you Mac and you’ll get a plain white menu bar. This hack forces the window server to act as if it were running on older hardware that didn’t support fragment processing. I hope Apple gives us a configurable option (at least a dwrite) in the future so that people can rely on it. It’s a shame that law-abiding citizens like myself can be driven to commit crimes against system integrity over minor look-and-feel issues but that’s what happens when people get desperate.

You can accomplish the same thing in Terminal by using this code:

sudo defaults write /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.WindowServer 'EnvironmentVariables' -dict 'CI_NO_BACKGROUND_IMAGE' 1

If you prefer an opaque gray menu, change the “1″ at the end of the line of code to an “0″.

Thanks, Steve, for solving this annoyance for all of us!