The options to enable the statusbar in Edit-->Preferences and View-->Statusbar are partially unlinked despite doing the exact same thing. For example, enabling it in the preferences menu won't tick the option in View-->Statusbar
This was in the gtk3 version, with gtk 3.14. I am not sure if this works in gtk2
Closing as duplicate. Anyway, thank you for the bug report. *** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of bug 11046 ***