Help! Phantom Drive in disk Utility, causes problems

Last week I had an external firewire drive fail. I was away and just discovered it today. When I look in Disk Utility, I see a device still listed for the drive even though it won't mount. I unplugged the external drive and restarted the computer and it is still there.
This causes two problems:
1. it takes forever to reboot the computer, as it spends 10-15 minutes trying to establish communications with a hardware device that isn't there.
2. I cannot log out or shut down. I have to cut the power to the computer to restart it.
How can I remove the dead device from the list of devices OSX is looking for? I imagine my startup and shutdown problems are related to some device entry somewhere. Before I start looking into replacing the drive and recovering the data from the dead unit, I'd like to resolve the issue with the OS.
Any idea how to get rid of the traces of the old drive that are still there?
DC

While in Disk Utility and the HD disconnected, CMD or OPT click and drag that icon out of DU's window. It should go poof, just like removing stuff from the Dock.

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