How to remove phantom drive?

I have a phantom removable disk drive (4) G: showing in Computer Management, this is also giving me real hassle as in thread;

Problem: Autoplay System Reserved (G:) error appearing.

In Computer Management there is also a flashing G: or sometimes L: along side the System Reserved partition. I am hoping that removing this phantom drive may fix the problem in the link above.

If I untick Autoplay the problems stop but the drive is still shown in Computer Management.

I have tried System Restore with AV Bitdefender TS 2012 turned off but was unable to complete.

Any suggestions?

Thanks Golden, your comments made me look at 'my computer' and try a few things...

This is confusing to say the least!
It seems that Drive 4 is my Canon printer which shows up in Computer Management as drive G.
While I have the printer turned on System Reserved has a flashing L: to its right.
When the printer is off System Reserved has a flashing G: to its right. All the time the mouse curser is showing as repeatedly loading something, on and off, on and off.....

The Canon printer has card slots, I've never used them and the printer has been installed for over a year without any problems.

Any clue to what I should look for appreciated.

Bit more playing on my part.
With no card reader in my USB and the printer turned off System Reserved shows a flashing 'G:' to its right in Computer Management. No Drive 4 or 5.

Plug in my card reader to the USB, this shows as Drive 4 'G:' in My Computer with a flashing 'L:' to the right of 'System Reserved' in Computer Management.

Turn on my Canon printer and this shows as Drive 5 'L:' in My Computer, with a flashing 'N:' to the right of 'System Reserved' in Computer Management.

Should there be any drive letter shown against 'System Reserved' ?

Thanks for your help.

No, System Reserved normally doesn't have a drive letter.
I'm just on my way out the door, but I'll have another look at this thread when I get back in a couple of hours.

To be honest I'm not sure what is going on, even after reading the other thread you linked too. My best guess is something has assigned a driver letter to the system reserved and autoplay doesn't like that. That or the Tom Tom software has messed something up. I've had my system reserved get a drive letter in Windows 8, something to do with my dual boot setup is my guess. I just went into disk management and removed the drive letter for that partition. Rebooted and everything was fine after that. I'm not sure what the flashing drive letter means, drive letter conflict maybe? I tried to Google it but all I got was how to assign a drive letter to a flash drive.

I have no idea what's going on either . !!

Just checked and there is no drive letter shown for the System Reserved (I checked to see if I could change the letter to see if there was one- then cancelled!)

The G: is still there, flashing away merrily

Got to be a way out somewhere, without a re-install of everything

Personally, I don't use Autoplay, its one of the first things I turn off. Everything I install and or use is on thumb drives, and I run the setup manually anyway. I find it more of an annoyance than a help. Thats just me though.
I don't have near the amount of drives you have connected either. My external is only turned on when I need it. I also have Windows set to NOT display drive letters. I'd never know if its drive letter changed anyway. On my system it wouldn't matter anyway, I don't have any programs tied to that drive anyway. Your phantom drive does appear to be the card reader in your printer though. Not much you can do about that, unless you can disable it in the printer settings/firmware.