The other day I had a language bar problem on the XP machine, where the language bar was missing and couldn’t show up as the button was greyed out in the control panel. The language bar is critical program for using IME of more than one language in XP. Basically unchecking the advanced text services didn’t work because it kept greying out. The language bar had no buttons on it. The problem was simply due to spyware infecting a program ctfmon.exe required for the language bar in XP. Once scanning with a virus scanner it must have quarintined or deleted the file. So I moved a backup copy of the program by searching from the windows folder back into the original folder C:\windows\system32\ Now it works again.
The solution was found by searching in google for “how to remove the language bar”. By understanding how to remove the language bar would give information on how to get it back I thought. The search “language bar problem” led to a lot of dead ends. So sometimes the probelm to a solution is found by solving !problem or defining what the problem is not and using that to solve the problem.
