I just ran your command to remove all the files, indeed the default behaviour menu is lightweight again.

After single pressing to bring up the remote buddy menu, single pressing to hide it, I then frontrow-ed (by holding menu), and single clicked menu to return. By accident i then started holding menu again, when really i wanted a click to see what the remote buddy menu would look like, i let go and frontrow didn't appear for whatever reason. Another single click and the remote buddy menu looked fine.

Another loop of then single clicking to hide the remote buddy menu, holding for frontrow, single clicking to exit frontrow, and then single clicking to bring up the remote buddy menu got me to the broken no entries menu again.

This was before changing any menus or settings since deleting the plist files you suggested.

Have you tried this, with say desktop, or a finder window in focus.. I don't know what else to try, its a fairly clean brand new mac mini, 2ghz C2D. Running 10.5.1.

Whatever extra diagnostics you require would be fine, if there are options i can run that generate logs i could post to this thread or email you i'd be happy to do so to help try and debug the problem.

Thanks for your quick replies.