On my Mandriva 2007 I have so far escaped pretty well all the problems reported here. However, yesterday the mounting of the usb key stopped working. What happened was that my daughter was logged in to the machine, and I needed to do something, and logged in in a nested window. I plugged the USB key in and it appeared on both desktops. I transferred my files, and then from her desktop (KDE) selected "Safely unmount". The usb key unmounted and the icon disappeared. It also seemed to crash my login in the nested window.
Since then the automounting of the USB key does not work, just coming up with a message that there is no entry in fstab for sda1. I have looked to see if there were any files changed at that time which might lock the usb, and to see if there are any lock files left lying around, but could not find any.
Any suggestions ( other than putting the old hotplug package on )?