Problem with Safely Remove Hardware feature

I am using 2 external hard drives and both are from different manufacturers. I dont want to have them on at all times and have no success in safely unplugging them using the Safely Remove Hardware application found in the system tray. When ever I am trying the application I get a busy popup. The seagate tells me that the busy notice is most likely dueto Windows Explorer. Will it be possible to temporarily inactive Windows Explorer? If so then how? Thanks

What you are getting is not an infrequent occurrence with Windows and certain combinations of hardware. Windows Explorer provides the Graphical User Interface, that is, the GUI. You can stop explorer.exe using Task Manager but then you'd have no GUI and no Icon(s) to click on; no way to invoke the "Safely Remove Hardware" dialog. The primary (possibly the only) reason you need to "safely remove hardware" is to ensure that delayed writes to the device(s) have been completed.

You can try to kill it in Task Manager and then from the Task Manager File Menu run this to get the Safely Remove Hardware dialogue:

RUNDLL32.EXE SHELL32.DLL,Control_RunDLL HotPlug.dll

After that try to restart Explorer.exe from the same File Menu.

You should know that windows explorer is your GUI. So if you want to show it to you then open your task manager and stop the process explorer - it will reset your computer, with out rebooting.

Thanks for the response. I have installed Windows XP on my system and when I open Task Manager I do not see explorer.exe. If I press the Microsoft/E key it takes me to MY Computer; if I enter explorer.exe in Run it opens MY Documents. How can I get Windows Explorer to appear in Task Manager so I can end task it? Thanks

Can you try to look in the "Processes" tab for Explorer.exe, it's not shown in the "Applications" tab. Also it will not work if you have SP3 installed. When you stop explorer now just have your background showing - no reset. It really wasn't of any use stopping explorer in XP, it when it reset half of your systray programs wouldn't reload.