Internal / External drives not mounting.

Hi All,
I have a Mac Pro Early 2008 that has suddenly developed the problem of not showing any of the three internal hard drives or any of the connected external drives on the desktop. The system drive does appear. This is a recent development but did not happen immediately after installing 10.6.
Potentially related, I can not shut down (also recent) without forcing to with the power button. Also takes an extremely long time to power up. Five minutes or so.
So far I have attempted repairing permissions, restart, resetting the SMC, and none of these have fixed the problem. Any suggestions greatly appreciated.

Just some of my experiences:
Checkmark got lost in Finder's Pref dialog for "show drives" "show external drives"
External drives got corrupted since I turned the power off the very second the drive-symbol disappeared from my desktop = I learnt that the drive is still doing some cleanup though it does not show anymore. So give it another 30 seconds before disconnecting its power supply
Luckily I had a backup since I always run TWO backupdrives parallel as a kind of mirror. So I reformated the corrupted drive and had the same problem. Somewhere in this forum I found that a slight change in size forces Apple's drive-utility to REALLY clean up everything from scratch. So I change the partition sizes by 1MB ... now no problem anymore.
My internal drive with OSX 10.6 has also been starting very slowly. I found out that removing as many as possible caches incl. the image OSX saves whenever you close the MacBook helps. Some of that cleanup was done using TinkerTool Systems and Onyx. Others was done manually. I also deleted many preference and .plist files like those of safari or preview
Finally I deleted all stuff which might initiate time-consuming internal communication ... no automatic check for updates. All programs needing "SIMBL" and Bonjour had to go. I had forgotten some test-entries in my networks systemprefs which made the system look for network connections. It goes without saying that any "connect automatically at startup" should go as well. I also had the spotlight index redone. Microsoft's Entourage Database was also checked and compressed. At the end I checked everything with Apple's disk-utility, DiskWarrior and Onyx. Now I am back at about 50 seconds for start-up
By the way: I deleted all 20 or so RSS-feeds and removed all widgets which depend on external information (like weather, airport departure). Funny enough - since then I also have no hang-ups experienced, whenever Safari is open. Since all these little workers update in different intervals I suspect that sometimes, their updating adds up and block the MacBook for 1 Minute or so.

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