Why has the Safely Remove Hardware icon disappeared?

Q I have a Dell Optiplex PC, that runs Windows XP Professional. The Safely Remove Hardware icon has disappeared from Notification Area.

When I right-click the Taskbar and select Customize Notifications, the icon appears under Past Items and I don’t know how to get it back - can you help?
Alireza Shekarrizi

A There are two potential problems here. First, Windows tries to be helpful by hiding icons in the Notification Area that it doesn’t think you need - and it doesn’t always get it right.

To access Hidden icons, click the ‘Show hidden icons’ button at the left of the Notification Area - they will be hidden again after a short delay.

To override this behaviour, first right-click the Notification Area and select the Customize Notifications option. Now changing the Behavior option for the appropriate icon by clicking it - select ‘Always show’ instead.

Sometimes the Safely Remove Hardware icon disappears and cannot be restored in this way. This is a common - but still unexplained - problem that seems to plague this particular icon in Windows XP.

One workaround is to click Start followed by Run. Then type c:\windows\system32\rundll32.exe shell32.dll,control_rundll hotplug.dll into the Command window and press Enter. Click OK and the Safely Remove Hardware dialogue box will open.

This will not only let you eject the appropriate device once more, but should restore the icon to the Notification Area, too.

Update
Q  I followed the advice you gave to restore the Safely Remove Hardware Icon.

However, despite following your instructions exactly – clicking Start, choosing Run and typing in the published command – Windows displays the error message ‘Error in shell32.dll, Missing entry: control_rundllhotplug.dll’.

What am I doing wrong?
Alireza Shekarrizi

A  Our apologies to Alireza and the other readers who contacted us about this error – we made a mistake when printing the solution to the problem. The command is case-sensitive and we mistakenly printed it in all lower-case – this generates the error.

The correct command, to be typed into the Run dialogue box (opened from the Start menu), should be: c:\windows\system32\rundll32.exe shell32.dll, Control_RunDLL hotplug.dll

Type this exactly as printed here, with the same capitalisation and spacing, and the Safely Remove Hardware dialogue box will open – we promise.