If you launch Emacs using the -nw flag to force a console session (rather than an X session if you have X windows running), how do you get to the menu?
There are some items held in the menus that are infrequently-enough used on my part that I don't recall the escape or control sequence to do them.
M-x menu-bar-open, which is usually bound to F10. This works with and without menu-bar-mode (which just shows the names of the menus at the top of the screen).
On my computer (with openSUSE), it is not F10 but M-` which allows to access menu items. More information is available here:
The F10 key will access the menus for me in both Windows versions and a console version in Red Hat Linux (RHEL) 4.
