What has happened is that the windows indeed are torn off. And their default positional codrinates tahat are stored most likely are beyond you screen area wich means the window is open and its hidden from you because ite beyond your viewavle area or its minimuzed into the lower window cornder.
To fix this:
You can move the prefs to a different folder and then move back fthing such as shelves and it should fix the problem automaticaly.
Or you can just delete the default positions of the windows, manualy via mel. Or downright kill them.
To esure it dont happen anew dont tear of windows but rather use tear of copy in wich case you can both have them as windws and panels ate the same time (its nice to have 3 or 4 different graph editors that arent attached to the main window thisway yu can quickly alt tab trough them, ore if you have 2 screens you could have the other full of graphs)
