Nevermind, I had set the exported the variable UBUNTU_MENUPROXY=0 trying to disable the menus following something I had found online. It turns out that was wrong. If you want to disable the global menus you need to unset that variable completely. It is odd that if the appmenu is unistalled and that variable is set to zero that it forces the gnome-terminal menu to show when it is started.
Nevermind, I had set the exported the variable UBUNTU_MENUPROXY=0 trying to disable the menus following something I had found online. It turns out that was wrong. If you want to disable the global menus you need to unset that variable completely. It is odd that if the appmenu is unistalled and that variable is set to zero that it forces the gnome-terminal menu to show when it is started.