Some sort of box across the screen

You will need to print this or write this down as these instructions involve shutting down your computer.
Here we go:
1. Shutdown your computer.
2. Press the power button on your computer to turn it on, after you the see the screen come up that says "Lenovo", write where your screen then goes black, you are going to repeatedly press the "F8" key until a weird screen comes up with different options.
3. You are going to select with your arrow keys "Safe Mode with Networking" and press enter.
4. Wait for your computer to go into safe mode, if box comes up asking if you want to go into safe mode press "yes".
5. Now go to your start menu and open "Internet Explorer".
6. At the top right go to "Tools" and then "Internet Options".
7. A windows will come up. Go to the "Connections" tab and hit the "LAN Settings" button at the bottom of the window.
8. In this new window that comes up, if there are any boxes checked, please un-check them now.
9. Hit Ok and then Ok again.
10. Please download the file from this address "http://download.bleepingcomputer.com/grinler/iExplore.exe".
11. When the box comes up if you want to Run or Save please hit "Run".
12. Wait for a black box to appear, then wait for the black box to disappear(this may take a while).
13. Once it has finished its job it will disappear, it may come up with a "log" file and you can just ignore that.
14. Now go to this address "http://www.bleepingcomputer.com/download/anti-virus/malwarebytes-anti-malware" and hit the blue "download now" button, and "Run" this program too.
15. Please go through the installation process and install it on your computer.
16. Once it has finished installing, please open the program and make sure there is a bullet beside "Perform full scan", then hit the "Scan" button.
17. The scan may take a few hours, once it has finished it will show all of the malware it found which will include the System Tool malware. Hit the "Remove selected" button at the bottom left.
18. Once it has finished removing the malware, simply turn off the computer and turn it back on as you normally would.
19. Everything should be 100% back to normal.

It's a text box for either closed captioning or demonstration mode. Go into the setup menu and turn off closed captioning. If you have trouble doing that, then just restore factory settings.

I think that is the closed caption box. as you look at the front of the tv the ears are for up and down and the face is the menu button. hit the face once the menu will come up . then hit the down button to get to the close caption. then hit the up volume key to enter close caption. from there turn close caption off then hit the face key and that should do it.

The black box is a text box for closed captioning. Some stations send the signal which turns on the box while not actually broadcasting any text. Go into your setup menu and turn off closed captioning, or at least change it to a different mode. The easiest option is to restore factory presets.

Problem solved! Thanks Panasonic Tech Support!!

In case anyone else has this problem, I'll tell you what I found out. This model DVD recorder does not have closed captioning functionality at all. So if this happens to yours, it is not the DVD recorder causing the problem. It is a setting on either your TV, cable box, or whatever else you have hooked up to it.

In my case, my daughter must have accidentally hit the "Text" option on our TV's caption menu. I changed that option back to its original setting, and the mysterious black box is gone.

The black box is there because your closed captioning is on and set to text mode. Some channels send the signal even when there is no actual text to display. You can get rid of it by either turning off closed captioning or changing it to CC1 or CC2 mode instead of text. If you can't find those settings, then restore factory settings as directed in your user manual.

This sound like a problem with the Closed Caption, on many sets if the C.C. is set to text a black box apears, and since it only happens on DVD you might look at the DVD menu and see if it has this Text featcher in the Closed Caption menu and turn it off

On the reomte control (bottom) left of the sleep button is a cc button, push that until "OFF" appears on the screen. The close caption box should disappear. It worked for me, finally.

Hi Krautner, We have a Toshiba and experienced the same problem this morning. It is very similar to your symptoms: big black box in centre-lower part of screen. It sometimes disappears momentarily when you select a feature such a "mute" for the same amount of time the screen displays that function. Once the "mute" signal disappears, the black box comes on again. I fixed the problem by turning off the close captioning function. Somehow, it had actually got switched on. It runs fine now. I suppose you have already found a fix since you posted back in May....but hopefully this helps you or someone else putting in a similar search for this fix. Cheers Geo

On your remote should be a button called TV caption or text. Turn off the closed caption as someone hit it and turned it on by accident. If its not on your remote, then it is in the menu. Good Luck Ps Please dont forget to rate this thread.