SOLVED Cortana shmortana!

[Bif]

Well a very interesting/bizarre thing just took place post rebooting my laptop after updating the Anti-Beacon program...the search box now shows our darling Cortana and a small microphone and takes up more real estate than it did prior to the reboot.
I have all that has ANYTHING to do with Cortana turned off as well as being "fully protected" according to Anti-Beacon...now when I click on the search box the lovely Cortana circle pops up and asks me to configure the setting to allow this, like I said EVERYTHING related to it is already disabled, so why is this showing all of a sudden?..I've made no changes at all..rechecked all of my settings and they remain the same..as you can see from my task bar (up/down arrows) that something is afoot here.My searchbox prior to rebooting was minus the little mic and Cortana O...any ideas??
I'd ask Cortana but we're not speaking...

 

[Trouble]

If everything is off as you've indicated, why not.....
Right click the taskbar, go up to "Cortana" in the context menu and select hidden?

 

[Bif]

Update!
The oddities abound!..I just rebooted ( again ) just for the heck of it and all is back to the way it was.. absolutely no clue why, or what happened but I guess I should be thankful that it didn't go south!
@Trouble..is was already hidden which added to the mystery..
Thanks for the suggestion!

 

[Regedit32]

Cortana probably wanted to phone home and chat to its cousin ET

 

[Norton]

Sorry Biff I have it turned off here too. Cortana is worse than GPS Susan. Never use it.

 

[Regedit32]

I think of the next OS Upgrade Cortana will be significantly more useful personally.

There is little point in worrying about the privacy issues given Windows 10 is now a Service in a cloud that effectively stores all our data anyway.

I intend to make use of the newer features they plan to introduce in Cortana when they are proven to be stable.