In KDE, when I click on the home icon and look at the devices, it shows two hda9's. One has /home and the other has /home/. Both contain the same items so I assume they are pointing to the samething. When I click on either on, there's a brief pause, the system beeps, a window that's too fast to read flashes across the screen and then I see the contents of that hd. Is this normal or is there a way to just get one hda9 to show up?

Post your /etc/fstab (and /etc/mtab - which shows actual mounted volumes)

fstab:
/dev/hda7 swap swap defaults 0 0
/dev/hda8 / ext3 defaults 1 1
/dev/hda9 /home/ ext3 defaults 1 2
/dev/hdb5 /win-media ntfs ro 1 0
/dev/hdb6 /win-temp ntfs ro 1 0
/dev/cdrom /mnt/cdrom iso9660 noauto,user,ro 0 0
/dev/fd0 /mnt/floppy auto noauto,user 0 0
devpts /dev/pts devpts gid=5,mode=620 0 0
proc /proc proc defaults 0 0

mtab:
/dev/hda8 / ext3 rw 0 0
proc /proc proc rw 0 0
/dev/hda9 /home ext3 rw 0 0
/dev/hdb5 /win-media ntfs ro 0 0
/dev/hdb6 /win-temp ntfs ro 0 0
devpts /dev/pts devpts rw,gid=5,mode=620 0 0
usbfs /proc/bus/usb usbfs rw 0 0
/dev/fd0 /mnt/floppy vfat rw,noexec,nosuid,nodev,user=sptchamp 0 0

You should change in fstab :
/dev/hda9 /home/ ext3 defaults 1 2

to:
/dev/hda9 /home ext3 defaults 1 2

And :
/dev/hdb5 /win-media ntfs ro 1 0
/dev/hdb6 /win-temp ntfs ro 1 0

to:
/dev/hdb5 /win-media ntfs ro 0 0
/dev/hdb6 /win-temp ntfs ro 0 0

As you certainly don't want that fsck has the idea to check your ntfs partitions at boot.

awesome, that worked. thanks a lot for the quick help.