I can't think of a better word for this than "weird."

I went back and reread most of the emails on the original thread, and both Ross and Bill suggested that something about "misc" might be off.

So, I created a new mount point called "other," pointed fstab at it, modified my scripts and symlinks that used to reference /misc, and rebooted.

Voila!

/other was automounted, as I wanted, and there's only one icon on the desktop for it.

I did notice along the way that /etc/rc.d/rc.sysinit had a mount -a with a -t list of types of FSs to mount, which did not include ext2 or ext3. I added those, and that did not help the /misc situation.

Apparently, there is something funny about /misc in FC8 (is that true in CentOS?).

Anyway, problem solved, thanks to all, enjoy your day, etc., etc.

mhr