Any time I use a program that requires a Optical media - K9copy or 'Add remove programs' in KDE, it fails miserably in properly mounting the media
:-(

Now, this is supposed to be piece of cake - it's RH's Fedora!

What's wrong?

BTW in Gnome it works perfect - but the machine is client's and he just prefers KDE better than Gnome

What shall I do?

Test with blank media and K3B.
Has it been tried in Gnome since the trouble was noticed?

did => won't :-)

Gnome works flawlessly as always on fedora

It's KDE that the dude wants (It's a kind'a "Can You do it?" issue ;-) )

And F8 has a reputation of "can be done" ...
And it seems to be inherited from Debian somehow with HAL???

Now hal+KDE in Slackware and/or Mandriva "just works"?

What, exactly, does it say?

Describe what happens from the time a blank CD is inserted.

After failing - enter "dmesg" and look at the last couple-dozen messages for notices about the optical drive/media etc.
It "just works" for everyone on KDE. Except your client.

The client has not got a standard KDE install. How was KDE installed? Has anything been done to change optical device support (installing 3rd-party players, enabling DVD support - libdvdcss? etc?)

The simplest fix would be to just reinstall fedora-KDE from the KDE live CD or the DVD.

sorry, I was in a hurry, so I miss-understood Your question.
Apologies.
:-(
Please follow below...

1. insert blank CD.
2. it 'hooks' and KDE fires the dialog up with 'actions' to be selected:
2a. do with k3b
2b. take no action
3. I select the 'k3b' option,
4. k3b starts and I'm able to burn to the disc...

k3b 'just works' as expected. ;-)

Now, a written CD (or other media) - that's a whole lot different story:

1. Insertion
2. Dialogue -> 'Open in new window'
3. error message about 'permissions'
... ?
I figured it has to do with permissions (I'm a heck of a smart ass, ain't I, a? )

I have to recheck this later, but I think it ain't reaching dmesg for it fails while KDE's 'sanity check' of some sort? But I might be wide off here - i check and come back with it...
Actually the mounting on KDE wasn't working for quite few machines I installed from that DVD media...
:-(
And the DVD had the right SHA1 sum of fedora's release?
1. I repeat, on GNOME it works perfect
2. I made a link to Nautilus and Nautilus can mount media - removable and non-os=local.
3. I think it's upstream traceable to Debian and HAl and Nautilus is 'just patched'.
1. 2. and 3. are IMHO only.
It was installed from the DVD first and then updated regularly with yum and pirut from fedora and livna repos.
Is that a kind of 'dark hacking'? I thought it's by the book?
:-(
Yes, I enabled livna.org - otherwise fedora just cant play multimedia for free which just sucks -
even 200MB NimbleX liveCD distro can do
- and I would then simply roll out Slackware?
I did it once too (rm-ed all but /home) for it blew the Xorg while running devel and testing for more recent code...
:-(
Right now that fedora has only fedora, updates and livna enabled for update/install
right now only GNOME and KDE desktops are enabled.

Any help is appreciated.

best regards.