I'm still not making any progress on this. Thanks for everyone's contributions so far. Any other ideas folks?

Ah, that is good to know. I skipped that part and somehow Windows showed me some greyed out devices which I uninstalled. I'll add the environment variable and see what else shows up. Thanks again....

Hows this for weird? Once I try to "eject" a thumb drive, windows explorer has all kinds of trouble making new folders on the main SSD. Like it is spinning in some kind of loop trying to deal with...

Tried that - no luck. Unlocker says "No locking handles found" Thanks tho!

Here is a curious behaviour. I have Kaspersky anti-virus installed on this machine. When I plug in a thumb drive, Kaspersky offers to scan it but then hangs up when I give it the go-ahead. Right...

Thanks Ztruker,
that is a fascinating answer. I'm puzzled what the reason is for creating the environment variable. It doesn't appear to be used once you create it. Is it some sort of easter egg?...

Hmm. I guess this didn't inspire any thoughts. I guess Windows just got confused or I have some flakey hardware. Time to reformat and reinstall all my software. yuck!

I'm struggling with a peculiar little problem. My old faithful windows 10 computer will never eject the USB thumb drive. It doesn't ever show any errors. Its quite puzzling. I have several usb...