I'm guessing your app is running on .NET Framework 4.x and very likely the appsetting is missing the following entry or it was set to false. Again, this is my assumption based on the description on your post. Since the client side validation was turn off / not available, the message will stay until after a successful post to the server.
<add key="ClientValidationEnabled" value="true" />
<add key="UnobtrusiveJavaScriptEnabled" value="true" />
More reading:
Brad Wilson: Unobtrusive Client Validation in ASP.NET MVC 3[
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