I use
 (custom-set-variables
 ; ...
  '(menu-accelerator-enabled nil t)
 ; ...
 )
 in my .emacs in native Windows 2000 XEmacs 21.4 and 21.5.
 
 This allows me to use
 M-f (forward-word)
 to access the file menu I first type Meta (which activates the first
 menu in the menubar) followed by f, which brings up the file menu.
 
 This way I get the best of both worlds.
 
 I would be interested to hear whether this works for you on Linux too. 
Nope, it seems that the trick doesn't work on Linux, unless i didn't understand
something properly. I tried to set both '(menu-accelerator-enabled nil t) and
'(menu-accelerator-enabled 'menu-fallback t) (and some vaiations
on the theme) in custom-set-variables function, but still it doesn't work.
But actually, even if that trick worked, 'menu-accelerator-enabled' variable 
doesn't work as documented, so IMHO it still would have considered to
be a bug.
Daniel.