recursion

Everyone who uses Windows knows that after a few months, it starts getting pretty crusty. Stuff just stops working. For me, one of those things is the Internet Explorer status bar. When I opened a new window, it would just disappear. For months, I've been opening new windows then going up to "View > Status Bar" to turn the damn thing back on. I poked around Google, but I couldn't find anything about this. I mean, how many pages are there on the net about IE and status bars? A lot. The weirdest part about it is that it didn't happen for Jenny's user. It worked just fine for her.

Today I finally fixed it. After trying a few searches, I hit one that works: "internet explorer" 6 "new window" "status bar" disappears.

That took me to this Annoyances.org discussion about the very problem, which took me to Microsoft's instructions on how to fix it.

Now, why didn't I think of that myself?

The funniest part about this problem is that it's a side effect of IE being "integrated" into the OS. I think screwing with the status bar setting when using Windows Explorer affects the status bar setting of Internet Explorer. But they sure showed Netscape, didn't they?