How to remove translucent gray bar across world

Question

Today while my daughter was playing Minecraft I noticed that there appeared to be a translucent gray bar covering most of the screen - everything except a margin at the top and bottom. It went away any time I went into the menus, and after fiddling around with the settings I couldn't get it to get away. I tried joining a second player and the bar got narrower, still covering the entire width of the screen but extending only a bit above the inventory bar to just past 1/3 of the screen up.

How can I get this bar to go away?

Update: I realized this bar looks like the gray bar that pops up whenever there is text - except taller. So I started spawning creepers until I couldn't any more, and sure enough, I did not get any messages telling me I was at the limit of how many I could spawn, even though I could no longer spawn more.

Update 2: I was able to make the problem go away as described in the answer below, but after restarting a second time, I am now stuck with the rotating progress "boxes" at the main menu; it has been sitting there for over ten minutes now not letting me do anything (except turn off the unit, which doesn't fix the problem, as soon as I try to start Minecraft again it gets stuck when I try to log in.)

Answer 1

I finally got the issue to do away. A simple restart of the game did not fix it, so I powered down the unit for about 15 minutes. Then after powering it back up, I loaded a different game, the exiting that and started Minecraft, and upon loading the same world the issue went away.

After this, I had additional problems which cycling power in this way did not fix. To completely fix the problem, I had to go to the home screen and find my way to restart the box from the menus (I think under settings, I will go back and look to confirm this as soon as I get the chance.) When I did this, instead of just the white logo on black screen I got the logo on the green background back that and it did a full restart. I then had to select a couple of time which save I wanted; there were two from the same day, and I picked the older one to sync to clear out any remaining bad data.

Answer 2

Turning off the HUD works but than you can't see your items until you go into your inventory. This causes another problem but still works.

Answer 3

The same thing happened to my Xbox what you have to do is restart the Xbox in settings where it says "restart of full submission" then just restart and when you go back on to minecraft the bar is gone.