Lion gripes/questions

[mknabster]

I just installed Lion yesterday on my late-2008 MacBook Pro, and there's quite a few issues i have been having with it:

First and foremost, when i close the lid of the laptop, it doesn't go into standby, all the windows shift over to my external monitor and won't go into standby. How do i get it back to what it's supposed to do?

When i'm in Finder, there used to be a little bar at the bottom which would show me how much free space is left on the drive i have selected; that bar is gone now. How do i get it back?

When I restart the computer, and yes, i have the restore windows checkbox unchecked, all the programs i had running before i shut down open right back up again.

The enlarge function in the upper right hand corner of iTunes, how do i disable that? I clicked it to see what it was, and i wasn't able to find the button to get out of without closing iTunes.

The reason why I installed Lion was so I can use Xcode, which now only supports Lion from what Apple told me. Is this true or not? And now i'm on my 5th download of Xcode since the App store kept crashing on me, so i haven't been able to successfully install it yet. It seems, graphically, that Lion is much more sluggish than i had thought, mission control is slow, Finder seems to lag in its performance, and even the dock lags when i move my cursor over it at times.

I would like to get rid of Lion and put SL back on, but i don't have a Time Machine backup so i would have to do everything for scratch, and i would rather not do that, at this time. Now i know a lot of people are going to react saying that i'm nuts because i don't use Time Machine, but i don't like those tools, I have had too many issues with them in the past that i just everything manually now.

So any help would be appreciated to try to alleviate my issues. Thanks

 

[Bob_Stan]

If you go into fullscreen mode, you can place your mouse at the top edge of the screen and you will get a menu bar with a blue square in the top right hand corner. Click it and you will be out of full screen mode.

 

[mknabster]

Oh now i see that, I guess those are just things i need to get used to.

 

[Chuckoir]

When i'm in Finder, there used to be a little bar at the bottom which would show me how much free space is left on the drive i have selected; that bar is gone now. How do i get it back?

Open Finder > View > Show Status Bar

When I restart the computer, and yes, i have the restore windows checkbox unchecked, all the programs i had running before i shut down open right back up again.

This is probably a stupid question, but you are actually closing the apps. (Right click > Quit) and not just clicking the red X? Another alternative would be to see what login items you have.
To check, System Preferences > Users & Groups > Login Items

The enlarge function in the upper right hand corner of iTunes, how do i disable that? I clicked it to see what it was, and i wasn't able to find the button to get out of without closing iTunes.

In addition to what Bob_Stan said, you can just press the Esc key, and that will get you out of full screen mode.

Hope that helps somewhat.