On my Win98 box, I can plug/unplug my USB compactFlash reader as much as I like. It simply appears and disappears as a removable drive in MyComputer.

On my Win2000 box, when I unplug it, it gives me that annoying "unsafe removal of device" error screen. Is there any way to kill that irritating message?

Windows 2000 is generally able to detect such removable hardware, in my experience, and is probably just annoyed that you didn't use Windows itself to actually power off the device before removing it.

I have also had this annoying problem. And I'm always scared that I'll tell it to power down one of my hard drives. I would think that this dialog would talk to whatever part of Windows that knows what kind of device it is. There's obviously no reason to spin down a flash card

On mine at least, there's a small icon on the lower right of the screen in the tray, and it's a little green arrow over top of some kind of gray object. Anyhow, double click that. When it's open in a new window, select the device, and tell it to kill it.

Can't recall the exact steps but it's pretty self explanatory. Works for me anyways!

Tony's problem is that it works fine without doing that, yet it pops up the annoying dialog anyway. He wants to disable the dialog altogether, since it's useless.

I don't know of a way to do it, though.

exactly.

There's obviously no reason to spin down a flash card

No, but if Windows is caching data on the device by default, pulling it without letting the OS know is a bad thing.

My empeg did this as well until the empeg USB driver specificially turned it off. Search for a flash driver that dosen't pop that message up, as it will probably also ensure the drive is not caching anything.

No, but if Windows is caching data on the device by default,

It's not. The caching checkbox is unchecked and grayed out for that device.

I want the message box to go away, damnit.