Bare fist monk questionFollow

I think if you remove and redrop the item, it shouldn't show the range item. Been a while since I had to work with that issue, but I know there's a workaround.

EQ kinda has an order in which it runs through equipment to determine what to display, and sets the display as the "last change" to the visible stuff. So if you unequip and reequip your bow, it'll show up. Re-equip a melee weapon, and it'll show up. There's also an order it goes through all wearable stuff as well. Back in the days before dyes, you'd often have different color wrist pieces, and when zoning it would always show the wrists as the color of the last equipped (left arm I think?). So you'd have to play around with which gear was were to make sure your appearance looked right. Inevitably, when you died and auto-equipped your gear, it would swap the wrist pieces around, so you'd have to go switch them again.

Lots of little oddities like this in the game.

Yep, left arm. I remember pre-Kunark, my druid had to wear his one Runed Mithril Bracer on the right side of the character sheet (which corresponds to the left arm) in order for it to show. During Velious when my Warrior got a bracer drop for her Kael armor quest, again, had to go in the right hand slot (left arm) to show on her (since her other bracer was like royal frosted velium or whatever the armor is that dorfs in Icewell dropped).

For the OP, try turning attack on and off. That's always been the easiest way for me to fix pri/sec/range visual bugs. Like when my ranger or warrior doesn't want to run around swinging a bow, I turn attack on and off and it swaps to whatever weapons they have equipped. I just checked and it does work for Monks. If you use a thrown weapon, it'll switch to showing that in your offhand but if you turn attack on and off, it shows your main/off hand weapons (even if they're your bare fists).