The easiest way is to use the Status-4-Evar add-on. With it you can choose to not display any of the status messages, or display them in the add-ons bar or location bar instead.

https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/addon/status-4-evar

Thanks Tony. Exactly what I needed :)

You're welcome

Had marked this as solved a day ago, but seems to have lost that setting. So, solved once again.

Tony, I wish you'd look at my other FF4 open questions :)

~Bob

That is so effing asinine that every solution to "we removed a very useful feature that has been consistently in place on all platforms and brands of browsers for the last 10-15 years" is "go find, download, and install a third-party add-on that will in all likelihood steal memory resources and processing cycles in order to override the default functionality of this browser, and it probably won't be compatible each time you update the browser and will therefore be disabled until the add-on author gets around to updating the add-on."

Here's another reason why not having the status on an actual status bar is completely idiotic: I frequently use phpmyadmin I keep having these same two problems:

1) When I hover the mouse over the narrow left column listing database tables and use the mousewheel to scroll down, the mouse is perpetually over a link, and so the status is always covering the item at the bottom of the panel, and EVERY time I scroll to the bottom, I keep trying to keep on scrolling and I wonder why the hell I can't find the last item which should be at the end of the list... and then I realize it's hidden under the bleeding status text.

2) I very frequently use the in-page search feature to very quickly jump to a predictably unique-enough portion of text. If this text happens to be a link, the link is selected (without browsing to it) and the URL appears in the status. I have always liked this feature. However, when I'm viewing a database table whose records are too wide to fit in the browser, a horizontal scrollbar appears, but when I want to grab that horizontal scrollbar and drag it left and right, I can never find it because it's hidden under that infernally misplaced status!!

Even outside of phpmyadmin, I'm constantly frustrated by the content at the bottom of the screen being obscured by the status, which happens constantly if resources are loading or the page body is filled with links.