It seems that the "Device is now safe to remove" pop-up message, when unmounting a USB device such as a flash drive, assumes that you only have one partition on said device. If you have two or more partitions, it shows up a separate "Device is now safe to remove" message for each volume you unmount, and if you do them all in succession, you get the pop-ups stacked neatly on top of each other in the corner of your screen (observed on Hardy 32-bit and 64-bit).
This presents problems for new users - if you've unmounted one volume, but not another on the same USB device, then the device is clearly not safe for disconnecting yet and the pop-up message is misleading.
Additionally, safely unmounted USB devices still appear in Gnome's "Computer" window (Places->Computer), but finally disappear when you physically disconnect the USB device. This can confuse users as well.
Finally, the way Ubuntu disconnects USB devices seems to be different to how Windows does it. Even though Ubuntu is satisfied that the device has been safely disconnected, the device itself believes otherwise. A typical example is pretty much any Nokia mobile phone that can act as a USB flash device such as a Nokia N95 - upon disconnecting the USB cable after a successful unmount, the phone insists that the disconnection was unclean and that "data could be lost". It only records a clean disconnection from Ubuntu if you perform a shutdown on Ubuntu (suggesting that the phone is only satisfied when the USB stack is finally shutdown). Not a big deal for experienced users who know that a safe disconnection did occur, but will certainly send new users into panic stations.
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