I have just discovered a plugin called After the Deadline, which returns the spell check to the Visual toolbar. This works in unison with Jetpack and future upgrades will be through Jetpack, so you have to download and install both.

What I am unclear about is that they want this:
A connection to WordPress.com is needed to enable features like Stats, Contact Forms, and Subscriptions. Connect now to get fueled up!

Why on earth would I want anything at all from Wordpress.com? I do subscriptions through feedburner, I have stats through cpanel and I use a plugin for a contact form. Any ideas anyone?

might try this, it's a fork of the plugin without jetpack

I don't think you need both plugins. I believe the After the Deadline functionality is built into the JetPack module. I found After the Deadline not too useful. I just use my browsers spell check functionality.

Thank you, I will give it a try!

Larry, I use Firefox predominantly, so while it will do some marginal spell checking, it does not do grammar checking and my customer, frankly, could use some of that!

But I will check out TinyMCE

TinyMCE spellchecker is fine, thank you! For some people I might still do After the Deadline/Jetpack, if only because they check grammar as well as spelling.