Missing Processing Tools in Vector Menu of QGIS?

According to https://hub.qgis.org/issues/15265, the GDAL tools might get lost if you have the processing tools installed as an external plugin.

Since some time, it has become a core plugin, so no need to be in the users .qgis2/python/plugins/processing folder. You can remove that savely.

Apart from that, I discovered a second Vector menue right to the Help menu, if my locale is not US English. Overriding the locale with US English puts them back together again.

I had the same issue, first thought it was intentional, but discovered if you delete the .qgis2 directory from user account this fixes the problem. See https://hub.qgis.org/issues/15265

The fTools plugin offered these menus and it has been removed from QGIS and is replaced with the processing plugin.

Just enable the processing plugin and the menu will be back. Note that you can go to Processing => Options => Menus, to configure in detail which algorithms will be available in the menu.

fTools and processing both offered the same tools in the past. This resulted in a much increased maintenance overhead and regularly issues were only addressed in one of the the two.

Processing offers a lot more possibilities like a vast amount of additional algorithms, modelling capabilities and configuration, so it's really worth it!