[nflug] HAL and thumb drives

[Joe]

What the HAL is going on?

I just love innocuous upgrades with unforeseen consequences.
I am running kubuntu hardy with up to date packages.

I just plugged in two different thumb drives and got locked out of
them.  When I click on the desktop icon that appears after I plug the
drive in, konqueror tries to open them but fails with the following
message box:

A security policy in place prevents this sender from sending this
message to this recipient, see message bus configuration file (rejected
message had interface "org.freedesktop.Hal.Device.Volume" member "mount"
error name "(unset)" destination "org.freedesktop.Hal")

Next, I su'd to root and created a /media/thumb drive directory.  I
tried to chmod it to 777 and to chown it to my user.
Both requests were ignored even though I was root! 

Finally, I mounted the thumb drive (mount /dev/sdb1 /media/thumb drive)
and copied my stuff to it as root from the command line.  It's a fat32,
so permissions don't matter, at least in this case, but having to do
this was ridiculous.

I'm not "all thumbs", but I do need them!

Any ideas on fixing this so normal users can access thumb drives again?

Thanks.

Joe