When I installed KDE on my netbook, I got 4.3.5. The Device Notifier is not reporting USB storage when plugged in.

I tried to add udev and udev-mount to /etc/runlevels/default, but they abort saying they are for baselayout-2. I don't know if they would have helped, but I thought I would try.

If scripts that need baselayout-2 are installed with 'emerge -aDu world', when will it be available?

It's a nuisance having to manually mount USB storage.
/etc/runlevels/default contains
autofs
dbus
hald
local
net.wlan0
netmount
ntp-client
ntpd
syslog-ng
vixie-cron

TIA
Jim

Your problem is not necessarily related to baselayout-2.x, kde4 uses udev/dbus for these things. So, first, make sure they both are running, rc-status and top can be useful for this. Also, double check that the device is not listed in /etc/fstab, most vfs's ignore devices listed there since they assume that fstab is handling them already. Make also sure that kde and any related package that has the udev, dbus, hal, devicekit and consolekit use flags have them turned on (or turn them on globally and do emerge -auDvN world).

You might also need to enable support for the relevant fs's, but since you can mount it manually I assume that's already ok.

This appears to be the problem. As indicated in my original post, /etc/init.d/udev is refusing to start, saying it needs baselayout-2 which does not appear to be available.

I misread your question.

I am not sure what the problem is, however, what udev version are we talking about? You could upgrade to baselayout 2, it's in portage, it's in ~arch though but most people use it without any problem.

There are some migration guides around, for example:
http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/openrc-migration.xml

Thanks.
I updated successfully and the reboot worked with only one minor snag.
wlan0 is reported as started but inactive. ntp does not start and the clock does not get set.
'ps aux' reports ntpd is running, so it must take a while to get started.

Newly plugged in USB drives are still not being seen by Device Notifier. Both udev and dbus are running. Do I need udev-mount and udev-postmount somewhere?

TIA
Jim