Take a look in Settings -> Accessibility, under the Services heading. Are those apps that show up in the upper left corner listed here? If so, they are running as services and apparently new programming guidelines require them to be shown in the Notification bar.
You can try going into the individual apps and looking in the settings for that app, to see if it'll allow you to turn the icon off. But often the message that you'll get (paraphrased) is that if you turn the icon off, the app may be swapped out of memory, in which case it'll stop working. That's why the apps are installed as services - so that doesn't happen. HTH.
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