Turning off the Annoying Signature Status Bar in Acrobat XI

UPDATE: This issue was fixed in the the Acrobat/Reader XI 11.04 update.

With the 11.03 update to Reader XI and Acrobat XI, you might have noticed that documents sometimes open with a green signature status bar:

I find this status bar really annoying and so do many of you.

Unfortunately, there is a bug in the code which leads to a lot of false positives. Thus, you may be seeing the green bar more than you should. We are going to refine the feature and likely include a preference to turn it off in a forthcoming update.

In the meantime . . .

On a document by document basis, you can reclaim the space taken up by the green status bar.

Here’s how . . . just click on the Signature icon at the top left of the status bar:

After clicking, the status bar is removed:

FYI, all of the Status Bars work that way. Just click on the leftmost icon in the status bar to reclaim the space.