When my docking dialog is docked to the bottom of my MDI application the status bar appears to be above. What is going on?

To make the status bar appear at the bottom you need to create status bar right after creating the CMainFrame and before all other child windows like dialog bars etc… The reason for this is because the MFC function CWnd::RepositionBars() iterates through all child windows to adjust their position and starts from the first child. So, the status bar has to be first child.