The Microsoft Office Language Bar has an annoying habit of activating itself on install. You can right click on the toolbars and select "disable" and when you reboot, voila, it comes back. I've heard that this has especially become an issue for people after installing IE 7. I don't know if the link below fixes the issue as related to the IE 7 install, but if the issue for me which happened long before IE 7 was installed.
This post is as much self serving as it is to help - I can never seem to find (easily, anyway) the Microsoft Knowledge Base article. So I'm posting it here for my easy reference, and perhaps it will help someone else. The fix
is here.