GtkMenuItems have too much padding at their ends since the upgrade to GTK 2.16.
I didn't find a setting for this in the GTK Reference Manual, so I filed this bug.
Downgrading to 2.14 shows the previous look, so I made screenshots:
  - Before with Gtk 2.14
  - After with Gtk 2.16
On small monitors this is a waste of screen estate, is it possible to revert back ?

I do not know why every single MenuItem is so wide since GTK 2.16, but the problem occurs even with Gnome default themes (all of them).
Every dropdown menu list looks much wider on my (small) screen now, am I the only one ?

I was curious to see if the problem was specific to my system config, so I downloaded the last Ubuntu and booted it.
Apparently the MenuItems are just as wide (even wider due to theme config).
Please have a look at the problem and revert to 2.14 padding/spacing style.

forwarded 524776 http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=611327
thanks

Hello,
I don't know whether this is a bug or not, for sure it's an undocumented
feature/change between versions (or at least I haven't found anything
directly related in NEWS). Thus forwarding upstream:
http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=611327.

Thanks for the bug report.

tag 524776 wontfix
thanks

This is an upstream intentional change. Tagging as wontfix.