Rox and ivman seem to be a bit hit and miss when mounting/unmounting or even detecting usb devices, particularly usb sticks.
One 'solution' to this problem is to install thunar-volman. This will (unfortunately) drag in thunar and some dependencies, but you should be able to mount/unmount devices without problems either via thunar itself or pcmanfm.
You'll have to configure thunar to use thunar-volman via thunar in preferences/advanced.

Thanks for looking into this, anti.

You're right about the hit and miss though. I have 2 usb sticks by the same manufacturer. The 1 GB stick can be mounted with rox to sdc1. The 4 GB stick needs to be fiddled with (Mount with control center (now read-only), unmount as root, unplug stick, replug and mount again with control center.) before mounting read-write to sdc1, as well (if only one stick is used), which seems weird to me because in M7 and my previous antiX each stick mounted to a different folder. OK, that's too much info in one sentence.

This is interesting: is the deciding factor, then the size? If both the sticks were 2 GiB, would we expect that to be fine, while if both were 4 GiB, we would expect both to be flaky?

on my install with the same usb stick it i got the good and the bad. it worked on , then i had to mount it or i wouldn't mount at all. so i think it's not a size matter. the read-only i get every time.

I have two old Kingston sticks (256mb & 1gb). Both mount automatically but must be unmounted as root. If I try and unmount as user, I get a message that I wasn't the one who mounted them.

I think I've gotten similar messages. I've also noticed that rox and pcmanfm behave a bit differently with usb devices.

john

Well, I have something new to add. All of a sudden my 4 GB usb stick mounts read-write in rox without me doing anything.

I just boot, put the stick in the port, and open rox, look in /media, and it is there mounted as /sdc1. The only thing I have done recently is to change my start up services using control center, edit controlcenter.sh and install inkscape.

1. I had too many instances of wicd stuck in my icewm panel (wicd doesn't work for me), and so I was looking at the sart up services from the system tab in control center. I unmarked wicd from starting, and while I was there, I marked fuse to start, because I will want to set up networking soon.

2. Then I edited controlcenter.sh to add rutilt to the wicd button and removed the button that added wicd to the panel, so I wouldn't add it again! __{{emoticon}}__

3. Then I also edited the icewm toolbar script because I realized that was all I had really needed for removing the wicd icons from the panel.

4. Then I installed inkscape.

Anyway could the automounting have something to do with fuse? I did not install thunar-volman. I don't think editing contol center or icewm toolbar or installing inkscape had anything to do with it. __{{emoticon}}__
Maybe someone else can try it.