Recovered from crash system permissions
 

I by accident removed my desktop and have since recovered it but I lost all systems permissions ie:external DVD and storage drives will not auto mount.

using Ubuntu 9.10 karmic koala on AMD 2800

I'm guessing that when you accidently removed your desktop that you were logged in as a regular user (i.e. not root). If that is the case, running as root, try creating another user on the system and see if the desktop for that user has the permissions that you want. If it does, then you can delete your original user and recreate it from root.