I've tried a few custom launcers and the notification bar is not transparent on any of them. Does anyone else have this issue or know how to correct it? It's very annoying and ugly looking.
I believe you're going to need a custom ROM to accomplish that (and I couldn't tell you which one). For this reason I tend to just hide my notification bar. If you use a launcher like Nova or Apex you can assign a gesture to show it if you need to see it (for example, I use Nova, and a one-finger downswipe shows the notification bar, then hides it again).