I turn off the status bar, myself, because that's not a pratical way to manage screen with 40+ windows. Using Ctrl-A + " will open a list of all screens. You can name individual windows with Ctrl-A + A. I also use a customized .screenrc that, among other things, shows the Shell Title message in the Window listing.
# terminfo and termcap for nice 256 color terminal
# allow bold colors - necessary for some reason
attrcolor b ".I"
# tell screen how to set colors. AB = background, AF=foreground
#termcapinfo xterm 'ti=\E[?1049h:te=\E[?1049l'
#termcapinfo xterm 'Co#256:AB=\E[48;5;%dm:AF=\E[38;5;%dm:hs:ts=\E]2;:fs=\007:ds=\E]2;screen\007'
termcapinfo xterm* 'Co#256:AB=\E[48;5;%dm:AF=\E[38;5;%dm:hs:ts=\E]2;:fs=\007:ds=\E]2;screen\007:ti=\E[?1049h:te=\E[?1049l:XT'
termcapinfo screen* 'Co#256:AB=\E[48;5;%dm:AF=\E[38;5;%dm:hs:ts=\E]2;:fs=\E\\:ds=\E]2;screen\E\\:ti=\E[?1049h:te=\E[?1049l:XT'
# erase background with current bg color
defbce "on"
altscreen on
#hardstatus on
defscrollback 2000
multiuser on
hardstatus string "[%n%?: %t%?] %h"
windowlist string "%3n %t %h%=%f"
Best Answer
Add
startup_message offto your .screenrc:Actually, the default is to display the startup message only when screen is not passed any argument.