CentOS 5.5 USB Device Mounting Annoyance

What do you expect the next version of your favourite distribution to be? Better or worse. For me upgrading CentOS 5.2 to 5.5 became a worse experience. I was running CentOS 5.2 on my office workstation (Dell Optiplex 360) for long. Never really needed/worried to upgrade cos it was only a work station, I mean no play, only work. However, of late I wanted to pull in some multimedia stuff from rpmforge (that's not available in official CentOS repo). At the same time I thought of upgrading the system also. And I went ahead... Read below for the annoyances.

The fully upgraded system now has two kernels - kernel-2.6.18-92.el5 (original CentOS 5.2 kernel) and kernel-2.6.18-194.el5 (came with CentOS 5.5 upgradation), menu.lst points to the latest kernel as default boot options.

1. Annoyances with the new kernel: Running the new CentOS 5.5 kernel was fast, responsive... audio/video worked like a charm. But oddly enough I am unable to mount any USB drives (specially the ones with sdhc cards such as phones and cameras); lsusb does show make of the device and its id, but refuses to automount it. Even doesn't accept manual mounts.

2. Newly surfaced problem with the old kernel: After being unable to mount usb devices I rebooted the system to run the old kernel. To my surprise, the old kernel automounted all the usb drives that I threw at it. But, sadly, alsa sound server did not work the way it should. It was working fine before upgradation.

Solution: I wandered across dozens of forums for a solution and could not get any. Now I've to boot to the old kernel when I need to use USB drives, otherwise, the default 2.6.18-194.el5 kernel handles everything quite well.

Please comment to this post if you have a solution for this weird problem.