I am wondering how far off piste you have gone from a standard install.

If you're not running the shipped kernel version. kernel 4.15 has some fairly serious issues with usb sticks and certain io schedulers.

My first install had awesome and slim. My second install did not have slim and had xdm and awesome. My third and current install is base run level 3. My virtual machine has xdm and awesome and thunar even works in awesome out of the box. And my wives computer has slim on 14.2 using xfce and thunar works fine.

I don't think it is a software misconfiguration. I don't see how it could be when all I did on third install was add a user. Additionally, on the VM, a user was added, configure xdm and install awesome and thunar works with no check boxes for moutnt/browse in thunar.