**** thumb drive refuses to eject
Whenever I eject a thumb drive or external hard drive, I get an error "The drive is in use. Try quitting some applications and try again."
Believe me, I've tried this every possible way. Quitting applications NEVER makes a difference. I'll strip down to bare Finder, and still the message will always persist. I'm guessing a cold shutdown would work, but that's just not reasonable. I should be able to eject a drive.
I have suspected a virus checker is camping the drive, but the checker will tell me when it has finished scanning the drive, and even after that, it still won't eject. I've also tried going into Activity Monitor and killing daemons that appear related to virus or backup, and that sometimes works.
I need "reliable". This is a Mac and that is my expectation. I can forgive Apple a bad third-party app/daemon, but I can't forgive Apple's refusing to positively identify the app or daemon responsible. How do I tell myself?
Alternately, what's the downside if I just rip the **** thing out and click off the warning message?