I have not been able to find the answer to this question anywhere, even in MS Knowledge Base. It seems that it must be a fluke, but I need help solving it.
When a USB storage device such as a thumb-drive (or whatever you want to call it) is plugged into one of our WinXP Pro machines, the system tray icon for unplugging/ejecting the device does not appear. In order to stop the device and safely unplug it, we must navigate through the device manager or My Computer (right click the device and select properties) to finally get to where we can stop it. When we DO click stop in this fashion, the “Unplug/Eject ICON” will briefly appear telling us to “click here to stop the device”, then disappear as the device is actually stopped. This icon appears so briefly that it is impossible to move the mouse over to it TO click it.
It doesn’t matter what manufacturer the USB “thumb-drive” is from, Sandisk, etc…, the same thing happens.
We’ve been through every article that even remotely mentions this icon and made sure that all settings that we’re able to get to are set properly. Nothing seems to help. This only happens on only ONE of the multitude of computers that we own which are exactly identical (mass purchase).
The icon acts as if it has a switch turned on/off that is set to the opposite of what it should be for the state the device is currently in.
HELP!!!!!!!!!!!!
(added) By the way, did I mention that in the control panel, the add/remove hardware feature only lists “add hardware”. The remove part is missing, even when logged in as the administrator. There is no way to get to the remove hardware portion of the wizard.
