Sticky Popup? -- SOLVED

[Scott Rossi]

Recently, I wrote:

> Is there any way to make the action of popping up a menu "sticky"?

Background: I was trying to get a menubar with a custom appearance (black
menubar, white button text) to work on Windows Vista and XP.  The problem
was, colorizing the menu buttons on XP winds up colorizing the text of the
menu (white text on a white background is fairly difficult to read), while
on Vista I found it virtually impossible to change the appearance of the
menu at all (it takes on the default appearance of the OS).

I tried using proxy buttons to display the menus of the real buttons, but in
doing so pulldown menus are no longer sticky, and when menus are popped,
their command-key equivalents are not displayed. Setting the menubar of the
stack to empty allowed customizing of the menubar itself, but then the
menubar lost its standard behavior and refused to respond to keyboard
shortcuts.

The solution I found was to set the ink of the default menubar to "noop" and
place a dummy menubar of my design *behind* the real menubar.  Even though
the real menubar is invisible, it responds to clicks and its pulldown menus
display properly, with their "stickiness" intact, so one gets the illusion
of clicking on the custom menubar.

Not sure if this is the best way to pull off custom menus, but it seems to
work fine here (and maybe this will save someone some hairpulling).

Regards,

Scott Rossi
Creative Director
Tactile Media, UX Design