HIGHLIGHT TEXT TOOL NOW ADDS STICKY NOTE

All comments have an attached note, but text markups don't display the "speech bubble" icon in the top left unless the note has content - or at least they shouldn't.

If for example you highlight some text (making a comment) and leave it blank, there should be no icon, only the highlight.
If you then open the comments list and add some text to the comment, the icon should appear.

There's an option in Preferences > Commenting to auto-copy selected text into markups - if that's turned on then all highlights, strikeouts etc will have the text added to the associated note, hence the icon will always show.

Thank you -- I was able to fix it. In Preferences > Commenting, I unchecked "Copy selected text into highlight....comment pop-ups". I'm not sure how it got checked in the first place but I'm good to go. Thank you for your quick response and a great solution.

I have over 5,000 of these stupid NOTES in my .pdf textbook instead of all the highlighting and underlining I spent months adding. I can't put into words how many ways I've tried to make them go away. I want my 6 color highlighting back. I've tried Acrobat 7 and Reader X. I had Reader 9.* and still the same problem. Have I wasted hundreds of hours of work on buggy Adobe software?
I have checked and un-checked lots of things. I've tried the cryptic "automatically open comment pop-ups for comments other than notes". Mine was not chedked, and I agree "it does not seem to do anything I can observe". Still no highlighting. Please, someone help me out here. I'm beggin' ya.

Greg, provide some more information, please.
You say that the highlights you made disappeared completely and are now notes?