Hans,
HAL does not depend on pmount, but pmount depends on libhal-storage.
KDE kio-plugins use pmount, while Gnome use gnome-volume-manager and gnome-vfs.
pmount installs an additional warpper pmount-hal.
According to the pmount manpage, you need users in the group 'plugdev'
(debian.)
But HAL is not the essential low level daemon to recognize and mount devices,
it's udev. Basically, mounting is triggered by udev, and many packages install
new udev rules into /etc/udev.
As for your problem, to me that seems to be a bug of the desktop session (eg,
insufficient udev configuration) and you should search their bug database.
Provided the device is recognized correctly at all, you can always force
specific mount options by 'hard' fstab entries, with options like eg.
"noauto,users,uid=1000,gid=50,sync,noatime,nodiratime,noexec". You can choose
the /dev/disk/by-label/ path to identify the device unambiguously.
m°
