Comment #3 on issue 493 by allber...@gmail.com: spawnPipe opens another instance of the applicatioon http://code.google.com/p/xmonad/issues/detail?id=493 The restart-on-mod-q behavior specifically depends on it actually using the pipe and being fed data by xmonad; if you don't have a StdinReader configured and referenced in the template, xmobar won't care what happens on its stdin and won't exit when the pipe from xmonad goes away. (You may want to take this up with xmobar's current maintainer; see http://github.com/jaor/xmobar) Alternately, you could rebind mod-q to explicitly kill any running xmobar-s. (No, this is not supposed to be a standard behavior; if xmonad isn't directly feeding it, xmonad should not be killing it.)