Once you’ve finished working with a USB flash drive then it’s easy just to unplug it right away, but of course that’s usually not a good idea. If the Windows cache contains changes which haven’t yet been written to the drive then removing it may result in lost data, so it’s always best to eject the drive first.

And if you find the standard Windows eject option isn’t as easy as you’d like, then there are plenty of capable alternatives around. RemoveDrive, for instance, which we wrote about back in November, makes it easy to eject drives from a shortcut or a custom script.

But ProEject takes the idea considerably further.

Ejecting a drive can be as easy as a quick double-click

The program starts by trying to close down any programs which you might have launched from the drive, for instance. Which seems a good idea to us, as if they’re still active then you won’t be able to eject the drive.

ProEject also attempts to clean up after your activities. So it’ll search the Most Recently Used areas of the Registry and look for shortcuts created in your SendTo, Recent, Quick Launch and (on Windows 7) Pinned folders, removing anything which might have been added in this session.

And the program has plenty of other interesting features. If your drive is using TrueCrypt, say, ProEject will recognise this and dismount it properly. It can work with many other tools to improve drive ejection (including RemoveDrive). There’s support for using Unlocker to help identify open file handles, too.

And if this still doesn’t provide precisely what you need, then command line support means you’re able to use some of ProEject’s functionality from your own scripts. (Check the program’s Readme.txt file for the details.)

We do have one or two issues with the program. When launched it displays all the drives connected to the system, for instance: seeing only the USB drives (or at least highlighting them) might simplify the process for the user.

And ProEject also has the occasional annoying delay. For example, if you view your current settings, then close the dialog without making changes, the program still rewrites its settings file, which on our test PC meant an 8 second wait until we could continue.

For the most part, though, ProEject proves to be a powerful tool which, once configured to suit your needs, can make it much easier to safely remove USB drives. And even with occasional irritations (which will be fixed in time – it’s only version 1.0, after all) we think the program is still strong enough to merit a place in most people’s portable USB toolkit.