CS4, no way to get rid of tabs?

Question

I thought the tabs were a nice idea until I got into my normal workflow, where I depend on dragging one image or layer into the other quite often. With each pic taking the whole tabbed page, that doesn't work.
So I reset the prefs to not open new images in tabs, and if you use file...open, or a shortcut and browse to the file, it works...they open in a window just like always. But dragging in a photo from another application such as ThumbsPlus opens it in a tab, no matter what I set the preferences at.
If there's no way to change that, besides manually going to each one and changing it to a window, i'm afraid I'll let the trial expire and content myself with PSCS3. This makes no sense.
I often will drag several images into PS, and while in some cases tabs are fine, in others they're not, and I want the default behavior to be a new window for each pic, regardless of whether I use file...open or drag it in from elsewhere.
Any ideas? (or any idea why they'd set it up that way, so that if I tell it not to use tabs, it still does for dragged pix?)

Answer 1

It's not a PC/Mac thing, otherwise the old versions would do the same thing, but I assume the smiley means you're joking...at least I hope so 8^).
The existence of workarounds doesn't excuse the problem. I can double click the images in Bridge and they'll open in PS with no tabs, but I don't want to have to use Bridge unless I choose to.
Seems simple; tabs turned off, you drag in a photo and there is no tab. I see no reason why file...open results in a windowed image, and drag and drop results in a tabbed one.
Even with keyboard shortcuts, duplicating the layer and getting it to whatever other document I choose is more hassle than simply dragging it there. If I drag two similar photos to PS so I can compare them side by side with some adjustment, it's extra steps to get rid of the tabs.
Whether this glitch is a real nuisance or a silly thing to whine about depends on your normal work procedures; there's no 'right' way to do many things in PS, but many options instead, and many of us have developed favorite procedures over the years. Giving the choice between tabs or no tabs, then forcing tabs anyway doesn't make sense, and it IS a nuisance to some of us. I seriously doubt that they intended it that way, it's probably an oversight, but it's an annoying one for some of us.
If every time you opened PS, you had to click and point several times to choose your colorspace, CMYK prefs, workspace, user name, and default palettes showing, you'd no doubt get annoyed about it; this is the same principle...while it can be worked around, it's extra things to do that are unnecessary. Because of the way I work on photos, I want them to open in windows, not tabs, plain and simple.