controlling the appearance of menus

[Rohan Nicholls <rohan nicholls pareto nl>]

Just want to say that my second visit to sawfish is turning out to be
quite a revelation, I am loving this window manager, and am very pleased
with its configurability.

Please excuse the newbie question if it has been answered but I have
googled and searched the list archives (not very helpful, I think there
is something wrong with the search engine there), and have looked at the
code in merlin's ugliness but the answer there seemed quite scary....

I have been messing with fvwm2 and was trying to figure out how to
configure the menus in the same way, ie. colour, font, image background,
icons etc. 

The merlin system seemed to need to hack the c code and put in access to
XLib, but I was wondering if there was a cleaner way to do this, as I
know that gnome uses icons in it's menus.

Tia for any help,

rohan