Windows 10 notification area, input indicator makes the notification area "jumpy"

Question

I type in English and Chinese, I use the Pinyin input method which is a Windows 10 built-in. When I'm typing this right now there are 2 icons in notification area indicating my current input method:

The icon beside the Wi-Fi icon says I'm typing in English. The icon to its right says I'm using the Pinyin input method.

Wen certain windows are active(I'm guessing when these windows don't allow input?) these 2 icons would not be there in the notification area. Now when I try to click on something(e.g. The Wi-Fi icon) in the notification area, these 2 icons would suddenly appear, and they would push the icon I wanted to click to the left. As a result, my click would not have any effect, I would need to move my cursor left accordingly and click again.

The only example I can find now is when I work in an RDP session using mremoteng. But because I work on RDP sessions a lot, I find it quite annoying.

So I'm just wondering if I can fix this.

Here's a Video I recorded just now.

Sorry I thought I've made my question pretty clear, but it appears I haven't. So here they are:

• why does the input indicator completely disappear in certain situations? In my case, the situation is when I'm in a RDP session in mremoteng
• And why would it suddenly appear when I try to click on any icon in the notification area, making all other icons change position?

Answer 1

The input indicators appear because by clicking outside of notepad you have changed your input method from simple English to complex.

The order of the icons in the notification area can be changed by dragging an icon to a new position and releasing. However, this might not work for these indicators, as they seem to be placed at the same place where the Language Bar would normally be situated.

I think there are two possibilities:

• As you indicated, replace these indicators by the Language Bar, whose placement is static
• Set the Language Bar to float, which might (or might not) do the same for these indicators (I can't test, not having the right environment).

Answer 2

Indeed this is an annoying RDP client feature. Same on Windows XP. Unfortunately I did not find a setting to disable it, still I managed to disable it for my setup (both XP and Windows 10).

The TS client gets an ITfLangBarMgr interface instance and when receiving focus it calls the ITfLangBarMgr.ShowFloating method that hides the input locale indicator. Then on losing focus it restores it.

One way to disable the "feature" is to filter the WM_SETFOCUS message going to the window. This is somewhat more complicated.

What I did is patch the mstscax.dll. Using a hex editor I searched for the ITfLangBarMgr interface GUID which is 87955690-e627-11d2-8ddb-00105a2799b5. I searched for (hex) 90 56 95 87. Then changed a single bit - changed 90 to 91. This results in the TS client not able to initiate an instance of the language bar manager interface and does not call the ShowFloating method anymore.