I am building a package of the Arduino IDE for a live CD I'm building; I'm trying to make upgrading things easier when it happens instead of chasing file all over the place. When I wrote and tested the menu file (to make things show up in the menu), it barfed with the following syntax error:
I've examined line 1 multiple times, then moved to looking through the entire file, and didn't find anything. I've reproduced the entire file below.
I looked at other menu files to see if I missed something (my first thought was maybe someone made a typo in the guide I was using, and you need quotes around the package name, but other menu files did not have quotes as well), but there was nothing immediately obvious.

I built things using Kubuntu 8.04 KDE4 Remix and tested in in Xubuntu 8.10 Beta in VirtualBox (so as not to ruin things by accident).

Very very VERY late reply but I've seen a few threads on ther internet without a proper solution for this particular error.

This error ("line 1: syntax error: word unexpected (expecting ")")") is misleading.
It leads one initially to suspect a scripting error.
It can because of trying to run an incompatible (maybe elf64, maybe for a different platform) binary on an elf32 platform (x86/i386).

It is quite like the misleading error you get in solaris 32bit or 64bit "Invalid argument" if trying to run an incompatible binary.

Idem, very late reply but may be relevant for some users who still have the same problem. So do I but I solve it just before report a bug on Debian Report Bugs...
So my system have about 50 entries missing on his menu and sub-menus. The difference between them is the executive rights of the file in /usr/share/menu/.
An item is present if his corresponding file in /usr/share/menu/ is not executable and an item is not present in the menu if the corresponding file in /usr/share/menu/ is executable.
Cheers,
hatori.