Japanese IME disappearing or other magical tricks (Windows 8.1)

A funny thing happened to me on my way to switching from English to Japanese using Microsoft's Japanese IME. It disappeared from the task bar. (I have tried uninstalling and reinstalling it to no avail in the control panel.) One further note is that this exact same thing happened to me when I was using Vista, and I ended up downloading Google's Japanese IME, which did work at that time, but it seems that Google has stopped development so it no longer works for 8.1.

Another odd thing happened at that time and it has happened this time as well. When I go to update another program and I am taken to the black window with the usual warning from Microsoft saying, that Windows does not recognize this program are you sure you want to continue, I see the IME in the corner of the blackened screen. I can click on it, but I can:t get it back to the task bar.

Has anyone every encountered this problem?:

Now I have a second problem rearing its ugly head. Apparently when I uninstalled and reinstalled the Japanese IME (to no avail), the keyboard was switched to Japanese style and now I can't get the keyboard back to a US style either....getting a bit frustrated...

Well, I was able to fix the keyboard when I went to the alternate screen. As CCleaner constantly updates and Windows always prompts me to continue on the alternate Windows screen, I clicked the Windows key plus spacebar before I clicked "allow CCleaner" and was able to switch to the US English keyboard from there, but I still don't know how to get the Japanese IME back to my desktop...

I'm still waiting for the brain trust to help me with the Japanese IME problem...any advice?

Thanks for the tip. I was hopeful that by switching to hot key mode, Windows would ignore the missing icon, but it doesn't seem to have any effect. For the time being, I am just using Google Translate and typing in English and then having the text translated into Japanese, then copying the outputted text and pasting it back into the translating dialogue box and then checking how good/bad the translation is...if it's terrible, then I repeat the process...sigh