Safely Remove Drive needed twice

[Mark]

Time to flog a not quite dead horse....

So, on the system I am testing (the Dell Precision), when I
right-click a USB drive icon and select "Safely Remove Drive" it works
with one click.  On my desktop at home, I still need to do this
procedure twice.

This suggests to me that there is a setting somewhere that can be
switched to make it work properly.

Why?

Well, for one (other) thing that also happens to be germane to this
particular conversation, when I installed Maverick on my home desktop,
my default nautilus mode was spatial mode.  On the test system, it was
browser mode by default and by force (i.e., I could not even open a
spatial mode window in nautilus at all).  In poking around
gconf-editor, I found the setting that does this and unchecked it.
Now I can get browser or spatial windows at my option (though I admit,
after some experimentation, I prefer browser mode in general; I just
like having all my options at MY disposal, not that of the
machine/OS/configuration/<whatever>).  I do find it more than a little
annoying that the nautilus help files say there is an option in the
Preferences->Behavior tab to control this when there is not, or at
east I've never seen it in the dozens of times I've looked over the
last month or so.

When I get the chance, I'm going to dump the output of gconftool-2 -R
/ into a file and compare it to the same output on my desktop.  I'm
sure there will be differences aplenty, but I bet one of them might be
the clue to this irksome mystery....