Uber-Noob Question about automounting USB hard drives

First, let me say I'm not just new to Arch, but new to Linux as well.  Been playing with it off & on for years, but mostly 'off'.  In the last 3 weeks I've installed 10-12 different distros between my 2 home PC's and VMware on my laptop.  I've installed Arch probably 5 times now, and have got the process down pretty good.  I've probably learned more about linux from installing and configuring Arch than any other distro, book, web site, etc.  So now I've got it up and running again in VMware on an Ubuntu 7.10 install on my old pc.  I've got gnome working, sound is fine, samba is fine, really no problems.  Except mounting USB drives.  I've read several posts here and the wiki, but nothing seems to be clear really. 
I think it may be a problem in the VM environment, but I want to be sure.  I'm planning to replace my Sidux install on my main PC with Arch later today or tomorrow.  Assuming I get it installed, and get gnome installed, will the gnome volume manager work like it does in other distros?  I don't mind doing the config by hand, but I do a lot with USB flash drives and USB hard drives, and it seems like it just doesn't work very well in Arch.  I actually replaced my ubuntu install last week with Arch, but got tired of trying to access my music on my USB drive, never could get it to mount.  So I just re-installed Ubuntu (shame on me, I know). 
So any help in getting some understanding in what needs to be done would be greatly appreciated.  (forgot to mention, I did follow the wiki steps for autofs, as well as the usb drive wiki stuff). 
Thanks.

it's all working fine now, the problem was in the VM.  I installed Arch on my main PC, and except for being an idiot, all went well.  My USB drives automount in gnome, as does my CD.  Haven't tried the ipods yet, but I'm sure there won't be a problem.  Key for me:  add my user to the storage group and reboot (logging off would of done the trick too I'm guessing).  Had the same problem with setting up X, needed to reboot and all was well.  Great distro, a helluva lot of fun to install and configure, and I've only done so little:) 

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