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.
F10 key will access the menus for me in both windows versions and a console version in RHEL 4
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: