I am running Ubuntu 12.04.04 LTS 64bit with a combination of Unity and Cairo.

The following behaviour of the panel is very annoying and I hope someone knows a fix. Since with Unity there are no windows control buttons on individual windows but the control buttons of the active window are on the global panel (unless the window is not maximized). If the dock pops up, it takes over the global panel. In order to close an application window I have so select the window of the application and I have to click on the global panel to have access to the window control buttons. Thats very annoying. Thus my question: is there a way to prevent cairo to take over the global panel? Which doesn't make much sense anyway.
Another way out would be to have every application open a not maximized window. A third solution would be to switch off the global panel function (I would like to keep the panel in place though to have access to networking, sound and to keep kalendar and time.