Clicking on the 'Safely remove hardware' icon in the system tray, I get this error message; An exception occured when trying to run shell32.dll, Control_RunDll hotplug.dll Then I receive another meassage; Run DLL as a App has encountered a problem..... I believe Kaspersky was responsible as I couldn't click through the allow/deny boxes that poped up when I went to remove my USB flash drive. I choose 'allow' to all those popups.
I have disabled Kaspersky, but no difference.

The drive seems to usually show up in 'My Computer', but either when I click on that icon w/o the drive inserted, or after I 'stop' that device and remove the drive I get that message.

Any ideas?

Seems it a problem caused by using Acronis True Image version 11.

See There's no patch that I know of. Just right click My Computer and select Properties, select Hardware, Device manager, select View, select View Hidden Devices, and then for each Genric-volume entry under Storage Volumes, right click and select update and let windows try to find a better driver for the Generic volume. If windows says it doesn't have a better driver, that's okay, but it will probably update at least one of the entries. Then close down the device manager and reboot. Prob should be gone. (http://forums.speedguide.net/showthread.php?t=233888)

I have used True Image, but only through the bootable CD, not as a installed program because of it being a memory and resource hog (processes running when I don't need them). It hasn't been used in this HDD.

1. "I have used True Image"
An early copy of version 11?
Apparently Acronis applied a fix around April 2008.

2. "but only through the bootable CD, not as a installed program"
Seems that won't have made you immune. :(

3. "It hasn't been used in this HDD"
I'm not sure exactly which operations with ATI11 cause the problem.
QUOTE from post #124 HERE (http://www.wilderssecurity.com/showthread.php?t=176066&page=5):
- Creating a Secure Zone may cause the problem, but it's not a prerequisite (I don't have one);
- Restoring a system partition with TI 11 certainly causes the problem;
- It makes no difference whether True Image is or is not installed.
An explanation of the cause [corruption of certain registry settings] begins at post #116.

4. I have used Acronis True Image v11, and it looks like I may have a problem in my own registry.
I've noticed lately [having restored an image of C: using the Seagate Disk Wizard (a rebranded version of ATI11)] that when I safely remove my USB HDD partitions I get a blue screen of death! :(
See the screenshot below from within my own Device Manager.
Notice the "Generic Volume" with the 6 bars after the name.
I'm going to try to fix that.
.

Looks like that fixed it. :)
.

Seems like a lot of people have fixed this bug by updating the generic volume drivers.

Googling (http://www.google.ie/search?hl=en&q=An+exception+occured+when+trying+to+run+shell32. dll%2C+Control_RunDll+hotplug.dll&btnG=Google+Search&meta=).