i got sudo set up and everything, but the gnome disk mounter still won't let a normal user mount any partitions. is there any i can get the disk mounter to work for a normal user? thanx.

First: what distro are you using? Other users of the same distro may be able to help.
Second: you should be able to change the permissions on the disk mounter (assuming you have root authority) to allow members of the users group to execute the disk mounter. If you don't want every user listed in the user group to be able to do that, create a new group, add the names of the users who should be able to use the disk mounter, then change the owner/user rights of the disk mounter to reflect the new user group with the appropiate permissions.

i'm usin slackware. i tried adding my user to the 'bin' group, which /bin/mount is a part of. still didn't work. i get a message "only root can mount" or something like that.

the way for this to work is to set the suid for the mount command. so basically,

chmod a+s /bin/mount
chmod a+s /bin/umount

On Debian 3.1, and probably other distributions, you can set the "user" option in /etc/fstab, which allow any user to mount the file system.
(see the manual for the mount command).