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