At leas that is what I think it is.

Environment: KDE 3.5.9 on Kubuntu 08.04

Problem:
I boot up, stick in a usb stick and nothing happens. dmesg tells me that it has been recognised and manual mounting works.

Temp. Solution:
System Settings - Notifications - bottom icon on left hand side (I cannot remember 'cos I'm on KDE 4.2...) - advanced tab - (de)activate bottom option
This has the usb stick appear on the desktop and lets me mount/umount it

However, this is not persistent On reboot I have to go through the same cycle again!

Any hints/clues/links out there?

Many thanks in advance.

This sounds like a damaged configuration file. No idea which one. Is it reproducible under a new user?

Unfortunately I have no means of testing as this is a production machine for a business a friend quite far away - ssh is as close as I ever get to it.

I agree with your "diagnosis", however. I wonder, is there any way to try and identify the problem?

fwiw, I copied ~.kde (quite heavily modified desktop) and put it onto his laptop, which works just fine. So I assume the file is /etc/ somewhere but that is just a guess 'cos now I'm losing my proverbial footing

If you have any idea how I could track down this file via ssh (the -X flag is unfortunately not an option as it is far to slow!) I'd be willing to send beer to a specified address in Oz

Argh. Distributions shouldn't make such large changes. Could you possibly provide the name of module in question? The only ones close to what I could find on my SUSE system were "Storage Media" and "System Notifications"

Storage Media seemed to match the most to the description you provided. If it is, try removing the configuration file "mediamanagerrc"

Okay, I created a new user and everything works as advertised. I then deleted ~/.kde/share/config/knotifyrc, went to kdm and logged back in again and it WORKS.

After a reboot, however, we have the same problem again.

So I put a command in rc6.d to delete the above file on every shutdown - but it didn't work

mediamanagerrc - I moved that to mediamanagerrc.bak and rebooted - again no joy.

I am somewhat stumped. Thinking a little bigger we have an autologin situation. Whenever I go down to kdm and log in manually it appears to work. But as soon as autologin is activated things go to pot. So there must be a some autologin konfiguration file that is the culprit! Nice writing posts and getting onto something at the same time Will now look for such file, any settings in the control panel but would still be grateful for any hints

It is highly likely that your system is still in the process of starting up when KDM is started, and services needed by KDE for device detection are not yet online.

Cheers, bcooksley!

So I suppose starting hal first and foremost and kdm somewhere in the background is the answer. Easy enough in Arch, in Kubuntu I don't know yet, only runlevels come to mind.

Will look into it