Comment 22 for bug 269441

It seems like the Trash icon has some sort of database of mounted drives to keep tabs of items that have been deleted, and then does not refresh this database to only display the status of actually mounted drives.

Since it can never "Empty" the trash of unmounted drives, the display remains showing items to be removed on unmounted or removed drives (and the removable drives could have their Trash actually emptied on other systems anyway).

It seems that the Trash icon needs to hook into the mount/unmount processes to keep itself only displaying the status of drives that are actually mounted on the system at any particular time.