Nothing to panic about there. Even Vista sees sata type drives more as addon rather then a standard like you would see with an ide drive. By default the Vista installer still looks for the first ide drive when going to install the new version. The safely remove icon seen in the system tray is also seen in XP as well.
You can hide that easy enough by simply right clicking on the Start task bar and going to the notification tab. There you will see the small check box for hiding inactive icons and the customize button to choose between hide when inactive, always show, and always hide. Once you select the option from the dropdown menu you simply click the apply button when exiting there.