One day, EQ started displaying the voice bar again. It had long since been disabled. Frustratingly, toggling the enable/disable button in the options window crashed EQ. Instantly. I tried a fresh install. No change. I tried fiddling with the settings. No change.

Also, I noticed that instead of camping out, EQ would freeze/hang when the camp countdown timer reached 0.

Long story short, I traced the issue back to windows update. Specifically, one of three updates:
kb3075249
kb3080149
kb3083324

Each deals with win10 style telemetry on win7 so I uninstalled each and prevented them from re-updating. Those EQ problems are fixed.