Windows 7: "Safely Remove Hardware" horrendously slow

Also the same problem with "Devices and Printers"...and about the type of devices I have the problem with when safely remove > all kind of USB devices unfortunately

I'm having this same problem with 3 out of 4 of the Windows 7 PC's at home.
It happens on 1 of the x64 pc's and 2 of the 32bit pc's. The other 64 bit machine has no delay. All the pc's are different brands, HP Dell Sony Acer.

It happens with any brand USB thumb drives and USB External Drives, from various manufacturers.
I've tried plugging the drives into external USB hubs as well as directly into the pc's and get the same result.

Ejecting the drive from Explorer works instantly.

I've tried USB drives with no data on.. also Fat and NTFS formats.

There is no spinning ring to indicate the system is thinking.

I've turned off AutoPlay and checked the Event Viewer.

I'm at a loss...

Any device, be it printer, USB modem, flash drive,..etc

It's worth to mention though that ejecting a flash memory from "Computer" window only takes two sec.

Having that said it looks pretty clear it's a problem with tray icon functionality :S

Same problem here... The safely remove hardware takes something like half a minute to pop up with any device plugged in (printer, usb drive, sd memory card, etc.). I usually just *don't* safely remove my stuff anymore... but it would be nice to get it fixed. Any ideas there?

Very strange indeed...it should be around the 5 seconds for the pop up message to appear

Is this could be latency in Explorer? Check your latency...

Have you tried the hardware and device troubleshooter? Open the Hardware and Devices troubleshooter

Cheers,
Cassandra
Microsoft Windows Outreach

Hi, I had the same problem and it seems I finally sorted it out.

As other users mentioned above, all of a sudden my OS (windows 7) begun to slow down the "safely remove hardware" menu popup.

After several (unsolving) searches on google, I experienced another similar problem with Adobe Illustrator: saving images took like forever, eventually freezing the app.

I found an article explaining that on Illustrator CS4 there's a bug: if the default printer is turned off it will hang on save / print.
In fact, my default printer (samsung ml-2010) was off (in other occurences, I wasn't at home so the printer was totally disconnected),

So I set windows builtin "xps writer" as default printer, and now Illustrator works fine... And GUESS WHAT?

The systemtray icon "safely remove hardware" now pops up the menu instantly

Solving 2 problems with 1 solution is really cool (and also extremely rare...).

I hope this solution will work for you too.

(sorry for msipells and typos; I'm from Italy)

OMG! You are a genious! Solved my problem by doing that and deleteing a Network printer which wasn't showing grayed out as the others network printers that where not available.

Thank you!
(Windows developers, take note!)

For me this solution doesn't work
I removed all printers (only setting Microsoft XPS as a default printer didn't help me), I left only XPS printer and no change... It takes about 15 seconds from clicking on icon until I have pop-up. I need the same time until I can see "Devices and printers"

When I try to remove USB flash using My computer, it works perfectly, I have pop-up instantly.

So any other idea, how to fix this?

I cannot believe that this is what worked to fix the issue! Ridiculous, but very happy that it is fixed. Grazie mille omg!