Okay, reading over this thread and gelling on it for a while, suddenly it's starting to sound somewhat familiar.
I know we're dealing with operating system differences (XP versus Vista/7), however it seems like the differences being described sound like the difference between owner-drawn menus and other menus in regular applications. See
Working With Owner-Drawn and Bitmap Menus In light of that, have you tried using the
Text Recognition feature? That may be the way to go with this so you can pass in the text and have it recognize the proper item.
