Contact Linking

In Outlook 2003 I used categories to define the kind of task or appointment and the contacts field to connect the task/appointment to contacts. In Outlook 2007 the contacts field is gone and there is no way to enter a contact (or group of contacts) to a task.

Is there a way to add contacts to tasks/appointments in Outlook 2007?

The Outlook To-Do Bar is too cluttered

In Outlook 2003 and previous the Task Pad only listed my tasks. I also used flagging to mark some messages. Now in Outlook 2007 these are all combined in the To-Do Bar. How do I get the Task Pad back?