Comment 3 for bug 541472

I propose that for consistency, except in exceptional circumstances, every menu item that has an icon should be the same height as an item that doesn't have an icon.

The "Applications" and "Places" menus used to be exceptional circumstances, because almost every item in those menus was a launcher (the Windows Start menu made every item oversized for the same reason). But now that those menus are being retired, any inconsistency elsewhere -- such as in the messaging and sound menus -- would be even more obvious.

At the default font size, Nautilus's "Open With" submenu and "Places" menu have nice examples of icons that don't make their items any taller. Unfortunately, in Ubuntu 10.10 at least, the icons don't increase when the font size does.

So, I think the ideal approach would be to change whatever constant or function programs like Nautilus use, so that the icon is the same size as it is now in the default font size, but scales up as the font size increases. And then to use that same constant or function for the messaging and sound menus.