John Austin wrote:
Thus the USB memory stick has to be removed and re-inserted to regain access.
For the USB disk you can just click on the icon
Why are the two "identical" devices treated differently?
Is there an easy method of changing all USB sticks to act the same as the USB Disk?
Actually I just had this same problem, granted I was on Gentoo when this happened, but I'd be willing to bet it's the same or similar problem. With KDE it is capable of mounting those devices on it's own, so in some cases hal/udev and KDE are competing against one another for mounting the disk. The symptom in my case was that the drive kept moving mount points from sda1 all the way down to sde1 over the course of an hour. In my case the way to fix this was to turn of ivman so that it wouldn't compete against KDE's kioslaves when mounting those USB drives I have.
HTH.