How to remove overlayed menu?

[Col.Flanders]

I've ony just begun tinkering - mostly with some quick missions. One thing I'm noticing is that the menu in the top left never goes away and is quite annoying (*your nick* has joined the battle!). This along with the local and zulu time displayed permanently is quite distracting. Is there any way to get rid of it? Right-clicking seemed like the intuitive thing to do but that doesn't seem to work.

Also, when testing the channel freeflight quick mission, all's well until I want a different a/c. It worked once when I selected the 109-E3 but then I noticed I had RAF markings. I exited out to go and change it but couldn't seem to find where to do that and then when I finally gave up and tried to go back in with the RAF E3, it kept starting the mission with the spitfire. What's up with that?