When I start an xfce session, I get the message 'Xfce Power Manager- HAL Daemon is not running'. This does not happen every time I start a session, but probably 50% of the time. I can start it using '/etc/init.d/hal restart'. This prevents me from using removable storage. I can see the devices being recognised, when I do 'tail -20 /var/log/messages', but xfce does not 'see' the devices and therefore I cannot move data to these devices. If I log-in using another desktop environment/ WM sucgh as Gnome, the removable USB drive is seen without any problems. I'm using Linux Mint Debian Edition, which is basically Debian 'Testing'. Please let me know if I can provide further information to solve this, as I'm having to use an alternative WM to mount my drives.
I think you have a problem on your setup, something prevents HAL from being up always, since you are on 'Testing', i guess this is a Debian related problem.
Yes, on debian testing (and ubuntu), hal isn't started at boot time anymore, but is spawned automatically when something requests it over the bus. Xfpm 0.8.x checks that hal is present before using it, which means it doesn't start it. This was worked around by assuming hal is always available (http://svn.debian.org/wsvn/pkg-xfce/goodies/tags/xfce4-power-manager/0.8.5-3/debian/patches/01_assume-hal-is-available.patch). So it's already fixed in debian testing, and anyway probably shouldn't have been reported here but on debian's bugtracker.