...Shaw Secure seems to have added an icon for spam control

Chances are that's the culprit. See Bruce's reply.

Less likely on its own but possibly related to the Spam button:

Toolbars disappear from Message Composition windows or the main OE window
http://www.insideoe.com/problems/bugs.htm#notoolbars

NB: I would not try any of the fixes on the above page with Shaw Secure
still installed as it is. If you can uninstall it & then reinstall it w/out
the anti-spam component (unlikely), do so, then try the fixes if needed.
--
~Robear Dyer (PA Bear)
MS MVP-Windows (IE/OE, Shell/User, Security), Aumha.org VSOP, DTS-L.org


Bryan Wiebe wrote:
Yesterday I uninstalled McAfee (trial ran out) and installed the
security program provided by my ISP (Shaw Secure). Today the toolbar in
OE6 is invisible each time one runs it. If one right clicks on the empty
space where it should be, one sees it is checked. If one clicks on the
checked menu item, the empty space goes away. But on right clicking
again and clicking on the unchecked menu item it comes back, but this
time with the icons that were supposed to be there all along. A couple
of other relevant facts: One is that Shaw Secure seems to have added an
icon for spam control, and Two is that I did use the Spyware feature to
remove some tracker cookies and Three, the icons will also reappear on
adding the views bar, which I don't want and certainly do want to do
each time I run OE6.

Bryan