Hi Scott, I don’t have a top page admin bar on the front end of my site. Instead I have a ‘Log In|Log Out’ and ‘My Home’ tab in my main menu. It isn’t member created links but rather the members only areas – Activity, People, Groups etc. In the Cbox settings, I have buddypress private community checked.
It is no major inconvenience because as you say if a member is viewing a non-restricted page (blogs, pages etc.) and tries to navigate to groups, for example, once they are automatically redirected to the registration page, they can click the’ log in’ tab on the menu to redirect again. It is just that it would be more convenient if the initial redirect went to ‘Log In’ in the first place – and the anyone wishing to join could just click register at the bottom of the box.