Windows 7: Safely Remove Hardware keyboard shortcut not working

A popular keyboard shortcut to invoke the Safely Remove Hardware dialog is to use the destination as:

Rundll32.exe Shell32.dll,Control_RunDLL HotPlug.dll 

The dialog that is displayed when this shortcut is invoked worked fine in Windows XP. In Windows 7 (64-bit) however, I notice that the same old dialog comes up, but if I choose to Stop any plugged device, I get an error.

Example screenshot:

This seems to be true for all removable USB devices, not just this particular one.

The same device however can be removed by right-clicking the Safely Remove Hardware and Eject Media icon in the Notification area of the Taskbar.

Why does this old dialog not work anymore in Windows 7 (64-bit)? Is there some other command-line invocation I can use instead for the same purpose?

Solution 1:

Some are reporting this is caused by Acronis Software being Installed on the system and may be due to one of the virtual device drivers installed by Acronis, I have Acronis installed and have this same issue.

I found this out by emailing Ed Bott

One could assume other software that installed a virtual device driver could cause the same issue.

Drivers installed by Acronis 11 on my system are:

snapman.sys (Acronis snapshot API)

tifsfilt.sys (Acronis file system filter)

timntr.sys (Acronis backup archive explorer)

tdrpman.sys (Acronis Try and Decide Restore Points volume filter driver)

I am troubleshooting exactly which driver is causing it on my PC, I will report back the results soon.

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UPDATE:

Uninstalled Acronis > reboot, but it left 2 Acronis drivers loading, so I cannot confirm this is the issue yet.

Update2: got the Acronis drivers to stop loading using AutoRuns > driver tab, I still have the same issue as you Ashwin, the mystery continues.

Update3: even in safe mode it errors out.

Update 4: I used Process Monitor to capture the events during eject, I did it for both methods, the usual method using the task bar icon and the RunDll method, the methods are completely different in how windows executes them and the processes it uses, since I can find no documentation about this command in Windows 7, I am going to assume it is a deprecated command that was never intended to work properly in Windows 7. .