I installed Saft, an error came up in the midst of installation locking my system completely; after rebooting, my menu bar items were missing and System Preferences were unavailable. I finally determined that saft had somehow disabled my "SystemUIServer" which controls those things.
So, be careful with this software -- fwiw, most people don't have this problem, but I did.

Here is where I found as a solution for the next person:

http://forums.macosxhints.com/archive/index.php/t-24775.html