USB mouse not detected at boot/SATA question

2 things:
First, I built me a new computer last weekend, and it pretty much works just as I want it to, however, as of a couple days ago, it stopped recognizing my mouse when it boots. The mouse is a basic Logitech USB optical wheel mouse, can't remember anything more specific than that. To get it going again all I have to do is unplug it and put it back and it works fine. The only thing I can think of that I changed at something around that time is that I updated my AMD 64 X2 CPU driver to the most current one.

The other thing is that the safely remove hardware icon shows up in my system tray in relation to my SATA harddrive. I know this because a lot of them are used in enclosures or whatever, and are meant to be hot swapped, but I dislike having that icon there. I have gone into the properties for it, and made sure that it was optimized for performance rather than hotswapping, but that didn't change anything. Is there another location for this option that I can look?

-Thanks