Since Luella's computer is not impaired I have to assume the problem is somewhere in mine.
EDIT - I find that both IE and Firefox are the same for both identities except that in Firefox I get the gray area with no text box when I choose FCK and in IE I get a normal white box but cannot type in it. In both the Plain Text and MCE modes, I can type, and the html codes work in MCE when I manually type them in, such as a line break (BR) code in < >, but there are no controls displayed above the box (in other words, it looks like the Plain Text option was chosen)