Can't turn off Subtitles



Running on a RPi4 via LibreElec (Kodi v21), library database on a second RPi4 Maria DB, and all of the media is on a giant media server.

I had a 4-year old install of LibreElec running, and the thumb drive got toasted by a power surge. I don’t know what version of Kodi it was running at the time (probably v20, since it doesn’t get rebooted often).

A power surge took out the thumb drive that was booting LibreElec/Kodi, so I had to image a new thumb drive with LibreElec/Kodi v21. I got reconnected to my db server okay, but I have an issue with subtitles.
I think I have them turned off in Settings/Player/Subtitles (there’s no actual way to turn them “off” that I can find, so I turned off subtitle parsing). but when I start up a video, I always get subtitles, and i have to disable them with my remote (a Windows Media remote). They stay disabled until I go back to the Kodi main menu, and then go back into Movies of TV Shows, and then I see them all over again. and once again, I have to disable them with my remote.

What am I doing wrong? What can I do to permanently turn subtitles off?