From time to time, when safely removing a USB drive, the USB device is still shown in "My Computer" even though the drive has been removed When this has happened windows seems to freeze at the shutdown window after I select "shut down". It does show the text Windows shutting down and then freezes. I came back about 10min later and it still hadn't shut down. So I physically unplugged the computer.
Any suggestions?
A couple of thing to try:
Reset the device:
- Control Panel > Device Manager > View Tab > Show Hidden Devices > Then plug in the USB stick (this makes it easier to see which listings are only for the stick)
- Select each instance of the stick and RIGHT CLICK and UNINSTALL
- for all instances. Remove the stick > restart the computer > test.
If that doesn't work you can try resetting the entire USB 'stack':
- Control Panel > Device Manager > USB Serial Controllers > RIGHT CLICK on EVERYTHING and UNINSTALL (except the category itself) > Restart > All will be reinstalled on startup with a nice clean 'stack'.
Hope that helps
Quote