Status? Argh.

In all the time I've been using Windows XP on my primary machine (since the 3rd beta), one thing has consitently driven me nuts: The status bar in Windows/Internet Explorer always disappears. No matter how many times I go to View | Status Bar, the next window I open or the next time I launch IE, it doesn't have a status bar. I had this problem on two different installs now. It finally occurred to me to find the fix this this problem, so I Googled it and had it solved in three minutes. Duh. (There's some complicated instructions there, but the simple one in the second post seemed to work for me.) I find it surprising that they decided to hide the status bar by default. It's like surfing blind. Perhaps they found that to newbies it was just a distraction and figured people who wanted it would figure it out, which wouldn't have been a problem had it behaved as expected.