Icon in Menu Bar

To remove any item from the menubar press the COMMAND key down and drag the item out of the menubar.

The item you referred to sounds like the BlueTooth icon which will appear ghosted if you do not have BlueTooth enabled via BlueTooth preferences.

Try to reinstall the operating system. That might help.

An extreme measure just get rid of an icon.

Do you have any third-party preference panes installed or a third-party utility that enables a menubar item? If so then check in Accounts preferences' Login Items to see if a login item is in the list. If so then select it and delete it. Other possible locations of a third-party enabler are:

/Home/Library/LaunchAgents/
/Library/LaunchAgents/
/Library/LaunchDaemons/
/Library/StartupItems/

I bet you have a Samsung laser printer, don't you?
And if so, it looks like you were dumb enough to put in the included CD! Don't! Those CD's are for the Windows Users!
Look what happened! It now installed the SmartPannel that is very un-fun to remove. Lucky for you, I re-looked up for you how to do it....as when I first got my mac, I too was dumb enough to put in that disk and got frustrated when I couldn't make the icon go away.

so . . . in:
~library/printers/SmartPanel
there is a script called iLaunchSP....Trash it!
Reboot!
It will be gone!

I am having the same issue, and yes I have the samsung printer. However, I do not have a Smartpanel folder in my ~library/printers folder. Nor do i have a "iLaunchSP" script anywhere on my Mac.

Any other ideas?

/Library/Printers/SPanel

remove it=put in TRASH

restart your Mac
THEN empty the trash.
Worked for me...... lets us know if it worked for you, PLEASE

To add to Kappy's list, menubar items that don't have their own "preference panes" for dealing with such things sometimes also pop up in "System/Library/CoreServices/ Menu Extras" too. Don't mess with regular Apple ones there, though, of course.

Cheers

Rod