Disabling "alt-*" menu functionality

[John Parejko <parejkoj gmail com>]

Is there any way to prevent gtk from taking over "alt-*" handling (e.g. alt-f for _File menu, alt-e for _Edit 
menu) from the application? I can see that some users use that, but others (like me) prefer to rebind alt to other 
functionality (e.g. find in Firefox).

Looking into this launchpad ticket [1], it appears that gtk is the root cause here, which is why I'm bringing 
it up on this list.

1: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/nautilus/+bug/1113420

There are a handful of suggestions on that ticket, none of which seem to apply to gtk-3. Is there another way 
to reconfigure gtk in this regard? It seems to be a problem across a variety of window managers (I've seen it 
in xfce4/xfwm, unity, and lxde/openbox).

I didn't see any tickets filed about this in the gtk bug tracker, but searching for "alt menu" resulted in a 
lot f hits...

Thank you,
John