In the last few days I finished the HAL extension. Now it works properly and detects all hardware components, including removable media, like USB stick, CD/DVD, SD card, ... hotplugged.
It was essential to add volume management to Xfce4. I'm testing a new version compiled with HAL support. There are some small issues, but basically work fine. It offers easy mount/umount, configurable automount of removable media, etc.
It will be posted in the next few days for public testing.