[kennedy]

At both work and home I have an external monitor... when I plug it in to my MacBook Pro, some windows stay on the laptop's screen, some appear on the external. Which screen a particular window appears on seems to be specific to that type of window... for example, Mail and VMware seemed to always go onto the built-in screen... even though I always move VMware back to the external screen.

HOWEVER, when I bought the latest MacBook Pro a couple months ago, it switched. Now the VMware always appears on the external (good), but Mail also always appears on the external (not so good).

I just had to swap my disk from that back into my old MacBook Pro (because the new one is defective), and interestingly the default screen used by each window changed back to what it was. Absolutely no change in software... same disk... just a different MacBook... different graphics card.

Sooo, it seems to be hardware-dependent.

Is there any way to get control of that behavior?
Is the actual behavior documented somewhere?

[ibook_steve]

I have never seen a window automatically move to an external display as soon as I connected it. As far as I know, that's not possible.

Which monitor (internal or external) do you have set as your main display (the one with the menubar on it)? If you have the menubar on the external display, then that might explain it.

You can change which display has the menubar by dragging the little menubar in the arrangement tab of Displays preferences.

Steve