failure to connect usb disk (hal)

[Micha Feigin <michf@post.tau.ac.il>]

Lately on two machines I can't connect external usb disks.

mounting with pmount-hal works fine but from within xfce at least, the disk
shows up, but when I try to mount it from the menu (places plugin and thunar) I
get the following error:

Failed to mount "1G Removable Volume".
org.freedesktop.hal.storage.mount-removable no <-- (action, result).

I think that I had this on a different machine but I'm not sure about it or how
I solved it. I believe that one of the hal files is broken, any idea on
how/what to fix?

Thanks