Disabling "tear away" menus

Okay, I've done a forum search, and came up empty.

I've taken an active dislike to the tear away menus, and want to disable them. I much prefer the ability to hit return and pull up my default chat, instead of ...my inventory, or my friends list, or my music controls, etc.
Is it possible to at this time, and if so, How?

I don't think you can disable them. However if you reattach them all (click the X in the upper right corner of each detached menu) then you should be able to hit enter to open or close the chat bar. At least it does for me.

-DB

no luck, when you close out the window, it leaves a yellow box around whatever you were looking at, friends list, inventory, map, mini map, etc. So when you hit return, it' pulls up whatever you just closed. And if I somehow misunderstood what I was reading...THAT"s the feature I want to turn off

*bump* just got off work, am still looking for a possible fix

I think the problem you're addressing here is not related to tear-off menus but to keyboard focus problems. Lindens are aware of this problem and testing a fix for this right now, IIRC.

I was present in the earlier release as well but wasn't affecting the chat as much.

The only hint I can give you is to make the keyboard focus on the chat button by clicking with your mouse. As long as you don't click on anything else Enter might bring up the chat dialog as usual.