Finally installed PaneKiller tonight and messed with it.

SWEEEEEEET.

Took a lot of tweaking to get it looking right and behaving the way I wanted it to behave, but the beauty of it is that it is so tweakable.

And it has a very clear setting on the first page, which was "on" by default: "Fetch icons in background". This is of course the very thing that the Windows Start menu does NOT do and was the source of my complaint.

Oh, and tear-off menus are too fun.