I talked to Adobe Thursday and the image will always snap open inside the application "frame," and at the upper left. This is the case whether tabbed or not. But after talking with them I was able to come up with a reasonable alternative that fits me well.
Here's what I was able to do. Keep in mind my calibrated monitor for my image is on the right. The monitor on the left is the one my OS recognizes as #1 and is the main desktop. It is not where I want my image when editing.
I put my CS4 application on the right monitor. All of my palettes are docked on my left monitor and they show up there immediately when opening CS4. So on monitor right, I have the application window with menus at the top, my tools palette over to the left edge, and my image(s). On monitor left I have palettes only; my histogram, layers palette, actions palette, character palette, and so on. They are "floating" over my desktop or whatever application I have open at the time, like Firefox or email.
This is taking some getting use to since it's a little different than my CS3 layout, but it works great. It is even more convenient in some ways because my commands (file, edit, etc.) are now closer being directly above my image on the right monitor, yet they do not really steal from the image real estate. It's the palettes I wanted out of the way.
I had always thought the palettes needed to stay inside the application "frame". I did not realize they can sit alone whether inside or outside the application "frame", and no matter where, they default to the location I left them upon opening CS4.
Hope this explanation makes sense.
Two "quirks":
- if you don't use tabbed mode, maximizing your image to fit the screen totally overlays the file menu, etc. at the top of the CS4 application. Weird and a bummer! I'm ok working in tabbed mode 99% of the time, though, so not a huge deal. But why they did this is not intuitive to me.
- for the setup that I described above to work, I think I finally decided you need to turn off "Enable Floating Document Window Docking" in preferences. I went through so many combinations of these settings that I can't remember for sure, but I think this is required. Everything is working great for me, and this function is turned off (not 100% sure whether it matters, though).
Whatever setup you settle on, be sure to create a custom Workspace so you can return to it should things get out of sorts or somehow return to the default.
Mark