I have got a problem to safely remove my USB sticks from the operating system Win 98 SE. The reason is that the „safe hardware removal“ icon disappeared from the task bar and I can’t rember when and why it may have happened. When I now want to disconnect the USB stick from the system I have to run down the computer, disengage the stick and restart the computer again. Not following this procedure results in a computer crash and possible data loss. The only hint how to resolve the problem is included in the installation flyer attached to the USB stick. It says that the function of the operating system should be used to safely remove the the hardware – period. I digged into it but I wasn’t very successful.
I would appreciate if somebody could help me to make the USB stick usage easier as it is today.

   Try going to Run and typing regedit
   In RegEdit find the HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\ShellServiceObjectDelayLoad key.  The SysTray value must be in the HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\ShellServiceObjectDelayLoad key of the registry.  If it is not there, try adding a string value to ShellServiceObjectDelayLoad (right click on it and select New then String Value) with a value name of SysTray and value data of {35CEC8A3-2BE6-11D2-8773-92E220524153}

An alternative less elegant method is to create the following shortcut on the desktop

rundll32.exe shell32.dll Control_RunDLL hotplug.dll SW_SHOW


This will execute the safe removal process

An even less elegant method is to Start|Run|systray.exe.
This problem had occurred to me, and I created a desktop icon pointing to the systray program.
I then put systray into the startup lineup, and it has been working ever since.