I think there are two issues here.

Sp2 prevents scripts / bhos etc programatically forcing full screen mode. This is a very good thing imo for all the reasons others have espoused ( over the many months jamie has been making this point Smiley )

However i think the expected behaviour when a person sat at the computer presses F11 is that ie *does* go full screen ( including hiding the status bar ). If it doesn't then i think this is a bug.

Unfortunately it seems hard to narrow down the cause enough to give a simple repro to the ie team - certainly i tried for an hour or so last night without much success - and our internal knowledge base / pss records didn't bring up any support cases associated to this problem as far as i could see

In my case if i boot into safe mode everything works as expected ( f11 - no status bar ), but other than that i'm no nearer to having anything useful to pass on...