My idea of improvement

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I think the move was pretty much flawless and the search now even works! :p
A couple of things bug me though, just my suggestions, the blue color of the links looks too retro (html style links) and kinda flashy in contrast to the rest of the site. Some parts of the site don't fit well now with the yello bar, and some other parts look too flat compared to the 3d'iness of the yellow bar. I think those 2 things could be tweaked a little bit, your call. Other than that, GREAT JOB!

Edit: Another suggesiton, the plan icon is not only old compared to the rest (it's like a 16x16 bitmap stretched) but I also think it would look better right-aligned, right now there's too much stuff on the left and nothing on the right, maybe all the icons for profiles, blogs, etc could be aligned to the right along with the title. Might balance things up a little bit, right now it's too crowded with the plan icon right next to the menu.

Edit2: Oops, hope im not bugging you much, I just remember something i forgot to mention. Clicking on myAccount 'activates' the community link (it's like selected) which gives the idea that you are 'there' but clicking community again takes you to the real link. So I would say nothing should be selected when you go to myAccount. No?

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I'm sure the nav bar on the right was removed to ease the load on the database querys and make the page loading faster, before for each page you opened (any) it had to query forums, resources, blogs and code snippets to add them to the right nav bar. It was nice, but probably this is one of the reasons the site loads faster, with lots of users those 4 extra queries can take a lot of load.

I think the new ui is cool, it just need polishing specially with the 'old' part integrated in the new part. For example in my browser there's still wasted space on the right, no nav bar but now white space. It would be nice if the yellow bar expanded to the very very right of the browser window and so did the content (the forum threads, resources, etc).
Also in the main screen for the site (www.garagegames.com) the content and ads are more aligned to the left than anything, I think it would like much tidier and nicer if it was aligned to right with it's right border just below the end of the yellow bar. Not to mention the colors in general, the blue title bars, the blue links, the grey backgrounds and the gray fonts, I don't think they fit nicely with the new 'theme'. If these things got adressed then the new design would be much better than the old one, but as is, I think the old one was more tightly integrated.