Menu bar shows twice on dual monitor, dock moves around

Really? You find having an extra menu bar wasting space on your desktop, the dock flitting from screen to screen blocking access to the bottoms of windows as it does and submenus popping up on the wrong screen disconnected from their parent menus normal and desirable? Well I certainly do not share your enthusiasm. I find it annoying in the extreme and if it isn't a bug, I find it incredibly poor design. I'm hoping that pinning the dock to the left or right rather than the bottom will help keep it on one screen. It seems to be helping so far. If there are any ideas for removing the rest of these lovely features do please share.

Sure. Keep in mind that when you plug a second monitor you get two monitor preferences windows, this option appears on the main window/screen only. And also, this only works in Mavericks, previous OS had one menu bar/dock only.

The setting is Displays have separate Spaces in the Mission Control system prefs.

What that does is create two separate displays, not one where the windows can extend across both.

Each display has its own menu bar, and the Dock will move from one to the other by dragging down to the bottom of where the Dock should be.

I have been using the "Displays have separate Spaces" feature from day one with Yosemite.

I have a problem with iTunes and only iTunes where after my displays go to sleep, the iTunes window moves to the primary monitor (the one with the Dock).

Every time I wake my displays from sleep, I have to move iTunes to my secondary monitor.

Any suggestions for how to get iTunes to always stay pinned to the secondary monitor?

I have always had the following "pinning" set, but it isn't helping:

I kind of like the second monitor menu bar feature, except for one really annoying problem: I frequently use my second monitor to watch video using VLC in full screen, but the menu bar won't go away in full screen no matter what. If I move the VLC window to my main MBP screen, the main menu bar vanishes when in full screen. Anyone else have this problem? It may be a VLC issue, I know youtube videos work fullscreen just fine.

I think some of those things are how they are supposed to be. Two screen support got new functions in Mavericks.

In Mavericks I get the double menu bar and the dock pops up in the last monitor where the mouse pointer was when using command-tab to switch apps or in the last monitor where it was used.

I have never noticed before but yes, in Mavericks (I rolled back after testing Yosemite), my MacBook screen is showing the Finder's menu bar (dimmed) and my external screen is showing the Firefox menu bar as I'm typing this. If I click on the Finder's menu bar it becomes the front app of course.

Application switcher (Cmd + Tab) and the Dock (Ctrl + F3) appears on the ext. screen no matter on which menu bar I clicked last time which seems correct to me. And if I move the cursor to the bottom of the MacBook screen the Dock appears there and Application Switcher moves to that screen also.

Personally I find this more useful than the pre-Mavericks behavior. I guess the Screens control panel lets you control which screen is the main one by default but that seems to change according to where you summon the Dock.

I do like to be able to invoke menus and the Dock for both screens more than the way it was before.

But the "disconnection" between menu bars seems a little strange unless you are working with different applications on each screen.

Once you have your external monitor connected, the only requirement is that the "Duplicate screens" option in System Preferences, Screen, Aligment (second tab) is unchecked.

(Sorry if the menu names don't match but my system is actually in Spanish)

Thanks for the image. That is called "mirroring". I don't think that is the answer, as my set up looks like yours already and I still do not have a second menu bar on the second display/monitor. I have two set ups, home and office, two different second monitors, and neither is working. There must be another way to produce this result. Are you saying that you do in fact see two menu bars? (I.e., in Safari, the menu bar for Safari on both displays)

I do have two menu bars with those settings, I get the Dock and the application switcher on the last monitor where I invoked them (by pointing to the bottom of the screen for example) but I never say that both menu bars where from the same app.

Most of the times I work with iTunes/Firefox on the macbook screen (so I get the iTunes/Firefox menu bar there) and let's say iPhoto on the external monitor, with its own menu bar there.

Sometimes both menu bars are from the same app but I haven't yet check for a logic behavior on when that happens.

I think that's right. I have worked with the separate Spaces configuration, but stopped using this because you can't treat them as one continuous space.

SecondBar is a program that used to handle this issue well; I'm not sure it is Yosemite-compatible (it sometimes crashes); I've asked the developer to confirm the compatibility question. Is there any other program available?

Well, I work on a daily basis on 2007 MacPro running Snow Leopard, and the Mid'12 MacBook Pro with Mavericks, both with dual screens and my workflow is: iTunes, Mail and any lengthy processing apps on the left, productivity apps and browser on the front screen.

In 10.6 I find annoying that the apps on the left don't get a menu bar, when I don't remember the shortcut for something I can't do with contextual menus, I need to move the cursor and look all the way to the other screen.

In Mavericks, when I have iTunes on the left and Photoshop/Ilustrator on the front, I always find the appropriate menu bar right on top and I find that extremely convenient. The only case when it doesn't work the way I like is when I'm working with two Photoshop windows (lets says Print preview on the left, one channel in the front) and the menu bar on the left don't show the Ps menus.

As for the Dock, mine has been set to auto hide since the first OS X came out, for me it has always been one of those fancy things for Windows users to envy but not really useful or time saving for me when working. I rather use Cmd-Tab and the F-keys, or trackpad gestures when on the MBP. I even use LaunchBar still on the MacPro since I find it faster and more convenient than Spotlight.

Of course, everyone have its own work flow and the OS should be flexible enough to accommodate that.

I never noticed the "Each screen has it own space" option, I think mine might have been on by default. And I haven't tried turning it off to see what it does.