Thanks Tom! That at least gave me a hint as to where this is happening. I used the sledgehammer approach of removing the DeviceKit-disks package entirely. That works, but a very cryptic error window does pop up every time I plug in a disk, and I don't get optical media automounted either. There ought to be a better solution, but this at least solves my immediate problem. Years ago, there was a media preferences item that had simple checkboxes to control automounting. It would be nice if that came back. At some point it went away in favor of the authorizations which has now gone away as well. I think someone was confused, as setting system policy for who has permission to mount devices should be completely orthogonal to whether a particular user wants devices automounted. In other words, just because I have permission from the administrator doesn't mean that I always want it to happen; I should still be able to disable it. (Obviously if the administrator doesn't give me permission, the user setting to enable it isn't going to actually let me mount disks.) Eric