With the memory stick plugged into the computer, in Windows Explorer click on the stick drive letter that's working. Click "Tools" on the top bar, and then click "Folder Options." Click on the "View" tab and make sure there's a check/dot at "show hidden files and folders." Also make sure to uncheck the line that says "Hide protected operating system files."

Very nearly all flash drives come with some sorts of small programs on them. On really cheap ones it may be just an advertisement to "buy a bigger one next time" but quite often its a "synch" program or some other sort of "file management" bit, and in any case is frequently in a "hidden folder" or is a single "hidden file."

Since the attributes can be applied separately to individual files, folders, and drives, your drive can come with stuff tagged as "hidden" and/or "system" on them. It may look like there's nothing there, since that drive can have different attributes than you've set for the rest of the computer. You may just not ever have seen what's on the stick (although it is possible that there really isn't anything there).

Also note that the "Safely Remove Hardware" button in the "System Tray" (more correctly the "Startup Tray" if you believe Microsoft) does not always give a visible message of when it's safe to remove.

If you click once, it often just "raises a flag" where you can click the drive/device you want to remove. In some configurations when you click the device, the "flag" just disappears, and you should get a "plunk" sound when it's safe to remove. If in doubt, you can click the tray button again and verify that the device is gone from the list of devices before you physicallly unplug it.

(If you double-click on the tray icon, it should actually open a menu up on the desktop, and you should be able to actually see the device disappear after you click the "Stop" button. The problem is that in this view all usb devices will show as "usb storage device at location 0" so there's no way to tell which to click if there's more than one.)

Small flash drives should usually "stop" almost immediately, but sometimes it takes a few seconds even for tiny ones. Large flash drives, and external hard drives sometimes will notify you that the device "cannot be stopped at this time." This usually means that there's still "stuff" in a read/write buffer somewhere. There's no reliable way to force the "drive" to finish clearing the buffers, so it may be necessary to just wait and try later.

If you restart the computer, it will try to dump all the drive buffers before shutting down, and you should be able to disconnect while the computer of "off" or (using the safely remove button) immediately after the reboot; but while the "finish writing" step is 99.9999% good it actually isn't 100% guaranteed to save everything. Data loss is rare, and critical data loss probably is extremely rare, but either can (at least theoretically) happen if you try to "hurry" a disconnect.

John