Hello,
I'm sorry for posting yet another topic about automounters and USB Flash but the existing topics don't answer my question.

I experience weird behavior of automounting of my USB Flash drive. In short, the problem is that KDE doesn't mount the drive (nothing happens when I insert my drive), although the core detects the new device, and I can mount it manually. Another problem is that this behavior is not stable: sometimes the drive mounts and sometimes it doesn't.

So my main question is: what service (daemon, program, anything) is responsible for automatic mounting of USB flashes in KDE 3.5.10? I need to know what to check first if my drive hadn't been mounted automatically, how to fix that without rebooting, and what is the supposed way the automounting is supposed to work in KDE by default.

The full story is below; it is quite long but may provide some important details.

I use KDE at my home computer for a couple of years, and originally I used to set up the automounter for Flash drives manually. I don't remember the details--I was a total newbie that time so my guru friend has suggested some things that worked. Anyway, the automounting worked until I believe autumn 2008--I've updated the system and then realized that USB Flash drives don't automount. That looked really strange because I have USB card reader and SD Flash cards automounted fine with it. The USB web camera also worked, and USB keyboard and mouse... I think the important thing here is that the feature stopped working after upgrading the system.

Anyway. At this time I have two machines (at work and at home) that both have Debian and are updated from the same sources--official Debian FTP, unstable branch. (The architecture differs--it's x86_64 for the work machine and i686 for the home one, but this doesn't matter I believe.) On both computers, the system is installed from scratch about 1-2 months ago using the same method:
1. Burn the netinstall CD
2. Install the core system
3. Change the source to unstable (initially it was testing)
4. Make dist-upgrade
5. Install kde-base (I don't need all) and applications

After the initial install, the automounting of USB Flash drives didn't work on both machines, but I've decided that it's OK as it didn't work on my home machine before reinstalling the system. This may look funny but I simply thought that it is the current state of the unstable distribution.

Two days ago I've plugged my Flash drive into the work machine and surprisingly it had mounted automatically! Later that day I've updated the home machine and realized that the automounter works there as well. So my assumption of the 'feature broken in the distribution' just had another proof.

However yesterday I've realized that the automounter doesn't work on the work machine again. The same problem--the core detects the device but KDE doesn't do anything.

And it still works on the home machine.

I don't turn off my work machine but do that for the home one; maybe the feature will work again if I reboot but that's not the way I'd like to solve this.

What should I check?

Oh yes, the system configuration for the work machine:
Architecture: x86_64
Core: 2.6.26-1-amd64
Distribution: unstable
KDE version: 3.5.10