Has The Missing Sophos icon problem re occurred today 27 Sep 2012 ?

Yes,  I noticed it this morning.  The shield was missing and also Sophos was unable to connect to services.  All Options were grayed out.  I uninstalled and reinstalled and it fixed itself.   This was on a computer that never received the "bad" update.   It was turned off at the time, so it only received the update that fixed the problem.

Many Thanks, I now know its not a fault my end

Many Thanks Reinstalled as your solution, 

However when you go to update it it dissappears again,

temporary solution is to select the Sophos shield  to stay in the dock. That way if a virus is found you get the yellow exclamation mark in the icon.

Have  fully unistalled and re installed

Sophos is now updating, with shield staying on Menu Bar even after several restarts

Anyone have any ideas as to why this suddenly happened..... the redownload/reinstall worked for me but hopefully this won't turn into a monthly event.  Initially I though that it could have been something to do with the recent upgrade to 10.8.2, but any problem from that would have appeared earlier.