Help... Access Menu Bar issue, not populating

I've been picking with VBA coding, macros, etc for a couple of years now and just 2 days ago I became stumped with a very odd issue.
I have been remediating Win xp -Office 2003 Access applications so they work in Win 7 using Office 2010. 2 days ago I successfully opened an access application in XP and noticed that there is a custom menu bar which is populated via a module... essentially the ADODB connection fetches the menu dropdown items and populates the custom menu bar. This works perfectly in Access 2003 (using xp os).
When I open it in Win 7, using Office 2010. The app opens properly and there are no missing references. All Menu dropdowns are populated, except for one (one that is titled 'Reports')... When this one is clicked, a blank square appears with no menu items. It's the only menu item like this, all other menubar buttons work great. That's part one of this strange issue. Part two is what really gets to me. If I right click the form (where the menu bar resides) and go to design view, then I change the view back to form view... the 'Report' menu button now has all of the menu items it should have been populated with in the first place.
I've tried debugging, recompiling... even inserting code to automatically change to design view and back to form view for me ... to work like a refresh on load. That last attempt didn't work because once you go to design view the code breaks and never executes the form view trigger.

This may sound like an easy one, but I'm honestly stuck on something that makes very little sense at this point.

Any ideas? Has anyone else ever experienced this? Thanks