Strange immovable icon on desktop

Urtica · 25 Dec 2015

Suddenly a strange icon has appeared on the upper left of the desktop of my Surface. It's immovable, floats over all windows, and interferes with pretty well darn near everything I want to do (produce documents & deal with other paperwork about 98% of the time). There is no right-click information, in fact no information of any sort -- left-click, right-click, hover tip, nada. Sorry I don't have screenshot capabilities yet: the icon is black with a sort of grayish tube and small white rectangle at the bottom of the tube. I can slide the white doodad up and down and see a percentage but it bounces right back to the bottom.

I would think it's telling my the pen battery is low -- except that I checked the battery and it's nearly to the top on both testers(1.3 in voltmeter type, 3/4 toward top of "green" in the range tester; both have proven reliable on other sizes of battery). The contacts are clean and shiny.

1. Why did this immovable monster appear?

2. What's with whoever designed it creating an immovable impenetrable in my face mess anyway?

3. What do I have to do to get rid of it?

4. Is there anything I can do to make it so I never see it again if I do manage to get rid of it?

TIA

Urtica, in very urticaceous mode.

davidhk · 25 Dec 2015

Looks familiar ?

That is the Volume bar which will appear at top left corner of the screen if you press Fn key + Volume Left/Right key at the keyboard.
You can have a similar bar for Brightness if you press Fn key + Brightness up/down key at the keyboard.

Yes, it is unmovable. However, the bar is supposed to disappear by itself after a few seconds. It should not stay on indefinitely.

Meanwhile, do a system restore. Pick a date when you did not have this issue as your restore point.
System Restore Windows 10

P.S. I do not have a Surface. So, what I wrote above may not be applicable to your tablet.

On my Surface RT, I can reproduce the same icon at upper left if I press Ctrl key + the Speaker icon at top row of the keyboard. But it will go away after a few seconds.

Ztruker · 25 Dec 2015

If not as davidhk mentioned, please post a screen capture so we know what you are talking about.

How to Take a Screenshot in Windows 10

Urtica · 26 Dec 2015

davidhk said:

Looks familiar ?

That is the Volume bar which will appear at top left corner of the screen if you press Fn key + Volume Left/Right key at the keyboard.
You can have a similar bar for Brightness if you press Fn key + Brightness up/down key at the keyboard.

Yes, it is unmovable. However, the bar is supposed to disappear by itself after a few seconds. It should not stay on indefinitely.

That is exactly it. Magic rays emanating from your response evidently cured the problem. I'd tried FN-every item that seemed as if it could have a percentage value. And restarted and then shut down with a pause, between attempts. Nada.

But lo! When I next turned the Surface on the bar was gone. Gone. Gone. (It was shut down overnight rather than for a few minutes, which evidently left time for the Magic Rays to work.) :)

And thanks so much. I'll have a much better idea what to do if it reappears now. Still learning my way around the Surface and installing my favorite utilities -- I've used Greenshot daily since I got it and forgot all about the snipping tool thingie.

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