Address bar missing

Ok, spent several hours trying to resolve an issue with a missing address bar in internet explorer 8 in Win7 Ultimate.

Things already done were to check the view settings for the toolbar entry, address bar option is not shown amongst the other choices like menu, favorites and command bar.

I searched through google for several ideas to fix this but in all instances, I could not find a solution. I tried looking through the registry settings on IE and found nothing there. I tried looking through the GPO entries and found nothing. There were a few registry tweaks I tried, along with a few from here to see what was wrong.

I even went so far as to do a trojan scan and found nothing there either.

In all instances, nothing, absolutely nothing has thus far fixed that problem. The strange thing is, the address bar is available in windows explorer.

I had downloaded the beta 9 in an attempt to see if that would correct the issue, but that has not, and seems to have made issues a bit worse, in that tabbed browsing is now missing, that is, tabs within the window. I can access the new tabs only from the task bar.

I am at the end of my wits here and about to reinstall windows. Has anyone else here ever encountered this issue and what did you do to resolve it, aside from the very common fixes (that do not work) found for this issue in google?

Thanks for the replies guys...

I had tried the reset option, it did not correct the issue.

as for the management console, it seems I have a deeper problem than first realized. When opening up the app, I have no extended tree as seen in the example. Different views, double clicking the root folder and so forth does not show me the tree.

I think at this time I am forced to reinstall the system unfortunately. Pretty frustrating as even system restore does not give me a point before this issue arose, which I assume happened sometime this past week, though perhaps sooner I cannot be certain. I normally use firefox, but I had to use IE because of compatibility issues with a printer web interface that firefox could not see, and that was when I noticed the problem, I could not type in the web address....

NUTS~!

Fortunately, the reinstall will be relatively quick, I have most of my stuff backed up in a second partition, so just a few apps need be installed and I am good to go.

Thanks anyway guys...