Well it seems one of the fixes I tried must have worked, but needed a reboot as I've just turned computer on today and the icon is back.
For future reference one of the fixes I found was to go to '
Add/remove windows components'>
Networking services and remove UPnP. Mine was alredy unticked so I added it again, then removed it.
The other possibility was to open the '
Safely Remove...' dialogue via '
Start>Run' - Enter "
RunDll32.exe shell32.dll,Control_RunDLL hotplug.dll" into the run box, this will bring up the 'Safely remove....' window. Apparently doing that alone can sometimes bring it back. Either way it took a restart to actually bring it back. The workaround was to create a shortcut using the above command (I can't link to the article explaining this but if you Google '
Safely remove hardware workaround' it should be at the top)
QUOTE(JohnDemolition @ Nov 12 2006, 08:30 PM) [snapback]54660[/snapback]
why do you even want it? it's almost useless.
Its essential to me. I use a usb modem and sometimes adding or removing something from another usb port
without safely removing it seems to interrupt the signal to my modem causing my net connection to drop out.