On my TUF Gaming F16 (2024) laptop the USB safely remove icon didn't go away even when nothing was plugged into the laptop. In the right-click menu of the icon it showed only the option to go to devices & printers with 3 dots below it, and, clicking on the 3 dots did nothing. This is a classical known problem on Windows, it dates back to at least the early days of Windows 10. I was a bit surprised to find that it still happened out-of-the-box on this brand new laptop which came with Windows 11 preinstalled on it by Asus, but anyway... here comes the solution.
In Device Manager, under the USB controllers category, the built-in webcam of this laptop appears as a USB composite device. I looked at the hardware ID string that can be found on the Details tab of the Properties window panel for this composite device to verify that it is indeed the webcam; having nothing plugged into the laptop's USB ports also makes it easier to identify the webcam on the list of devices under the USB controllers category. On my laptop, the hardware ID of the webcam is USB\VID_3277&PID_0029. So, next, I deleted this specific USB composite device from Device Manager. This doesn't cause the device driver's files to be removed from the Driver Store. All it does is it makes the webcam stop working until the computer is restarted because, when the computer is restarted, Windows will then automatically detect the device, configure the device, and start the device. That's it... now the USB safely remove icon behaves like normal again.
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