sorry, didn't realize you were joking, yesterday was a bad day. Anyways 'application.displaystatusbar = false' is just like setting the visible property of a control to hidden. It is still loaded, your code still interacts with it, it is just not visible to the user.

It is kind of hard to prove, because you can use 'application.statusbar' to return the value, but if Excel has control over it then it just returns "False". If you take control over it and assign it various values through your code you can use 'application.statsubar' to return the values that you have assigned to it to prove that it is still updating, but that only proves that it updates when you change it in your code...