Comment 4 for bug 217550

I've got exactly the same problem on Hardy. It has probably something to do with permission rights. I can manually eject my usb stick with sudo (from console), but I cannot do the same without it. To unmount the device however I don't need sudo. My guess is one of the recent upgrades was messed up. I've seen something like this before on debian. It took me a while to solve it. I had to add my user to plugdev group to make "remove safely" option work again (not this time though, my user is already there). Anyway, closer look on /etc/groups file might help. It may be that users are not added to a correct group during upgrade or that a group is missing.