Give up! Go home! Quit worrying.

Hope I got this in the right place this time . . .

Right, there is no fstab line, but this is what /media/.hal-mtab looks like:

/dev/sda1 501 0 vfat nosuid,nodev,uhelper=hal,flush,uid=501,noatime,utf8,shortname=lower /media/disk

In the Properties for the device on the desktime, on the "mounting" tab, the "Synchronous" option is *not* checked.

Oddly, it seems to get better as the disk is accessed--slightly. It takes a full 40 seconds just to mount the darn thing! The same disk does fine on other systems: XP, Kubuntu, Fedora, and another PClos box.

You could mount the medium your self.

A hard drive has a throughput of about 30 MB per second. Flash memory has a throughput of a few hundred kilobytes per second.

Well, here's what I did . . .

Went down to Staples and bought a Belkin PCI USB 2.0 card (has two external USB ports and 1 internal hook-up.)

Installed it, booted up, and it worked great!

KInfoCenter reports that the original USB ports were working at 12Mbit/s; these new PCI card ports are going at 480Mbit/s!

What gets me is that until I installed PCLinuxOS, I was fully satisfied with the flashdrive's speed. Never bothered to look for details, cause it worked well--almost a good as its working now.

Could Fedora/Kubuntu be doing something unorthodox to make old 1.0 ports work faster? Who knows . . . but for $30 its fixed.

Ken