Thank you Pasley, I like your solution and have it in use.

To me it makes sense to have the settings 'close' to the user profile, also makes the topbar look a bit cleaner again, more simple. The 'Dashboard' I would like to see as another Icon next to the other 3 Icons so that search and log out are the only option to the right and all 'personal' items are organised on the left. If you could help out getting rid of the 'Dashboard' text and use an icon instead, positioned next to the mail envelope that would be great! :)

Hi Eric,

if you look in the start.php of the core-plugin "dashboard" ("/mod/dashboard/start.php"), you will see, how the dashboard-menu is registered.

You can unregister and re-register the Menu-item by extending the code of the start.php of my plugin ("/mod/usersettings_remove/start.php"):

	// start at line 14
	if (elgg_is_active_plugin('dashboard')) {	
		elgg_unregister_menu_item('topbar','dashboard');
		elgg_register_menu_item('topbar', array(
			'name' => 'dashboard',
			'href' => 'dashboard',
			'text' => elgg_view_icon('home'),
			'priority' => 650, // messages have 600
		));
	}

May be, i will put this to the usersettings_remove-plugin too. But this is not really a plugin, it is more like a code example :-)