So I just lost an entire day of debugging on this one..
If your vb6 IDE starts loosing menu bars or command buttons its
probably because of a bad addin. Specifically you/they are
forgetting to delete a menu item that they added.
Things get totally screwy everything disappears eventually
and you have to keep resetting them which is super annoying.
I forgot I had added a new feature to my addin, so had to
search and destroy from scratch. it was super painful. I ended
up adding error handling everywhere and extra checks everywhere
but ultimately it was something i was totally overlooking the whole time.