Irritating pop-up "Volume" window on my laptop screen

I bought a laptop in Aug 2009 [HP Pavilion dv7]. It came Vista, but included a free upgrade to Windows 7, which I installed in Nov 2009, using the auto-install feature. The PC has worked perfectly fine except now my wife and I are experiencing a flashing black and white Volume window that pops up in the middle of the laptop screen. This narrow window has a bar moving horizontally back and forth from the right side. Sometimes an irritating clicking noise [like a Geiger counter] accompanies the movement.

The "Help" features of the PC and W7 haven't helped us, so we'd really appreciate finding out what this window is and how to remove it from the screen. Our PC Tools anti-virus software indicates no viral infection.

Hopefully, it's a simple adjustment that we just don't know about.

It's third-party software installed by HP that's the culprit... usually some sort of extra buttons or hot key software. Go into that to turn off the on-screen volume display.

Ok, I know this solution is going to sound a little weird, but after looking into this it seems that the solution below has fixed this problem for a number of people:

Try turning off the laptop, unplugging it and then removing the battery. Wait a few minutes and then plug the laptop back in and run it without the battery. The popup should not show up anymore, turn it off again and unplug it, put the battery back in and then plug it back in and see if the volume popup still does not show up.

Source: http://social.answers.microsoft.co [...] 34E4F0EF44

I hope this helps!

Brett M,
Windows Outreach Team

Thanks for the help; it's greatly appreciated. As for the suggestion to remove the laptop battery, that must be why the Help function referred to the battery [which didn't appear to relate to my problem].