Safe removal of USB devices kills my WiFi

Whenever I want to safely remove a USB device from my laptop, I left-click on the green arrow in the system tray and select the device I wish to remove.
The device is always stopped safely by Windows, but the problem is that it also disables the onboard wireless card!

When I go into device manager to take a look, the card is still seen by windows, but it has a big yellow exclamation mark next to it and says that the hardware is experiencing problems.
After this, the ONLY way to reactivate the card is to reboot the laptop.

Furthermore, the card isn't even listed under the list of removable USB devices, so I have no idea why Windows keeps removing the damned thing!

http://img74.imageshack.us/img74/7353/usberrorde5.png

Is there a registry fix or anything for this kind of problem? I can't find any fixes for similar problems on the intarweb :(

Cheers guys!

this rings a bell from when i was using Win2K with a Linksys PCMCIA wireless card, so you are not the only one that has seen this

Haha, ok, so is there any way to resolve it? It's really annoying.

I'm running a Fujistu-Siemens Amilo Xi1546 laptop if that helps.

Cheers!

Not so much of a fix, but you can remove USB flash drives etc, without the 'safe removal' stuff, just make sure it isn't being wirtten to.

Updating drivers and firmware can sometimes solve problems, and very rarely do any damage.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by chuckskull

Not so much of a fix, but you can remove USB flash drives etc, without the 'safe removal' stuff, just make sure it isn't being wirtten to.

---

Well, I've already told windows to optimise the drive for quick removal, which should prevent it from caching data and forgetting to transfer it, but I still seem to get data corruption if I don't safely remove it, even if I wait a few minutes after writing before I pull it out. To be fair, it's only happened about twice so far, but I've only had the laptop just under 2 months, and it's never happened before.

It's not an actual Flash drive that I'm using, it's a 3.5" HDD in a USB (Icy Box) enclosure. I think the HDD has a 2mb cache on it or something....do you reckon that if I don't safely remove it, the HDD doesn't get an instruction to dump its cache to disk and so loses the data when I switch it off? I have no idea if that's feasible or not, just an idea.

Ahh if it's a proper disk drive then it needs time to spin down before being unplugged. I presumed you were using a USB stick or similar.

Working your way through the device manager and clicking update drivers a few times might do some good.

Hmm, righto....I'll see what happens.

Can you not set the drive as removable (in device manager) and disable write-behind cachng, that should allow the device to be removed safely without the need to use that, and as a result, not killing the WiFi