From time to time, my status bar disappears. I used to believe this was due to a botched install or add-in. I recently upgraded to Team System Test Edition, and my status bar again disappeared. For the last few weeks I’ve been trying to figure out a time to do a full reinstall.
Today, I discovered this is a setting in Visual Studio (duh). So, if you see this:

and you can’t figure out how to get your status bar back, go to Tools –> Options –> Environment –> General section and check the “Show status bar” checkbox:
And you’ll have your status bar back:
