"Safely remove hardware" not displaying balloon

The "Safely Remove Hardware" icon in the notification area will not display the balloon-type notification upon removal of a USB drive or other device. I have mucked about all through my computer's settings, fiddled with the group policy editor and the registry, but to no avail. I attempted to customize the notification areas and set the icon to display icon and notifications, still nothing. At one point the icon wouldn't even recognize that I was right-clicking on it. It recognized my clicks after I tried a system restore but nothing else has worked.

tl;dr I want to have a balloon appear when I remove my USB drive

Thank you.
My apologies, allow me to explain. "tl;dr" is a convention from another forum meaning "too long; didn't read." It's used to summarize the post's message in a sort of short-hand.

I'm running the system scan now, thank you for the link.

I am always careful to change only what I want to in the registry. In this case my "mucking about" consisted of adding an item that would enable balloon notifications. Unfortunately it didn't work and was promptly deleted.

The problem is that when I click on the icon and eject a USB drive the balloon DOESN'T appear when it's safe. I want it to but it absolutely refuses to. Neither registry, nor notification area settings, nor policy edits will coax the balloon into appearing.

Another way to be assured it is safe to remove:

Dev mgr>right click on drive >Policies.

PSCO2007 said:

Another way to be assured it is safe to remove:

Dev mgr>right click on drive >Policies.

That's how it's set on all of my USBs, I tried setting it for better performance as well, but nothing changed. Still no balloon.

If you have it set for "safe removal," that's all you need.

You can also bring up the box - go to Run > type in RunDll32.exe shell32.dll,Control_RunDLL hotplug.dll