What happened to the toolbar?
 

Not sure what else to call it, but in recent weeks I have noticed that the nifty little toolbar is absent from above the reply box. It doesn't even show up when you select "go advanced." It used to look something like this:
http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2456/...d64c2aecdc.jpg

Is this something that I did with my settings? Or is this an unintended byproduct of an upgrade?
It was nice to click on an icon rather than manually typing the code for adding photos, making fonts bold or italic, adding smileyes, and posting links.

right click on the blank space or click on View > Toolbars. Check off the bars you want to see.

Your instructions seem only applicable to the toolbars that are a part of the browser. I'm talking about the one that is directly above and beside the space to add text - within the TFP window. You know, the one that offers spell check, different fonts and text colors, linking to images, quotes, etc... the icons that show up in that gray section in the photo above. Those features that help people quote and add pictures without typing in the code. There isn't even a blank space where it used to be.

If you mean this:

http://img146.imageshack.us/img146/3062/toolbars.jpg

They're definitely still there for me.

I'm actually a bit boggled that they'd somehow dissapear for you.

It's all one VBulletin control (id="vB_Editor_001" class="vBulletin_editor") so far as I know, and I don't know how you could get the white box without the toolbar at the top.

What Browser and version?

Yes! That's them. It's good to know that they are still visible to others . I'm using whatever version of Internet Explorer that came with Vista. I'm not running anything like noscripts, I thought that perhaps that was the problem on my husband's computer (Firefox on Ubuntu) where it first disappeared, but it hasn't been showing up on my laptop. I've tried changing skins and it doesn't help.

clear your browser cache and see if that helps.