Could it be standing to the rear of another palette or included into a palette as a tab that you are missing?
Bob
I've tried reinstalling from scratch and updating to latest verison of 9.0.2 but still nothing. I've also tried resizing the desktop to the biggest size to see if it had slid off the edge of the window, but have found nothing.
Any ideas? It's a pretty important feature to not be able to access.
In c:\Program Files\Adobe\
lives the folder for illustrator and it is named something like "Illustrator x.x.x" where the x's are the version numbers. Mine was Illustrator 9.0.1. I had upgraded to 9.0.2 but the name of this file stayed at 9.0.1. By changing the folder name to 9.0.2 the layers palette came back. It's odd that the updater didn't take care of renaming the file, but hopefully this will provide some use to others with the same problem.
Have you removed the AIPREFS file (it can be a hidden file) with Illustrator closed. That's probably what happened with your file name change.
:o
I'm glad I could assist you both. I haven't heard back from Kristina or Rob.