I finally found a dynamical, up-front root menu that works faithfully and can be edited like a static root menu - recommend it for next issue of Sparky-Openbox. For details, see
http://lxlinux.com/obmenu-generator.html.
Picture: (http://lxlinux.com/obmenu-generator.png)
A map diagram to show the power of obmenu-generator:
http://lxlinux.com/menusmap/menus.html .