Actually, the places bar or rather the lack of it is an OS issue, not necessarily hardwired into the program.
When a program can be run in XP compatibility mode, like Textpad, as below, the places bar shows up, but not otherwise.
Also, when I run Office 2010 on my XP box, I get the places bar, but not on my Win 7 laptop. So there must be a way to get it to happen. We just haven't found it yet.