Yeah, everyone hates it. It's a pointless icon designed to make people overparanoid about unplugging their USB device from the computer, all because some dumbass decided to yank their brand new £500 external hard drive out when it was copying files over. Let's face it: if the activity LED on the device stops flashing, and you're not actively using your device, the chances are you can pull it out with no problems at all. At the very most you could probably have a corrupt file there, I'm sure it's not going to kill your device.
With all of that in mind, I've been searching for years now to find a way to remove the little green bastard, and I think this under rated solution by someone called "Shonk" is the perfect little application for the job.
You simply run the installer, which copies a program over to System32 which runs when you boot your pc. Then, if you need to safely remove your device with no icon, you simply right click on the device in question in my computer, and click "Safely Remove".
Ha! Me and some other people from a random forum kicking Microsoft's ass yet again.
Download Hide Safely Remove Hardware Icon.zip52 KB - Run HideSRHi.exe when extracted.
What?! How does this not have ANY comments? Thank you so much for uploading this! Elegant and simple, one of the most prominent minor annoyances of XP gone! Thanks!
-Alex