the hald script that starts up hal daemon for initng starts it with a --drop-priv... option that normal init does nou use (normal init starts hald witout any options. The problem is that the fstab-sync functionality of hal does not seem to work (does not create new fstab entries when inserting new media; so kde media manager does not work) with this option set.
http://bugzilla.initng.thinktux.net/
(In reply to comment #1) > http://bugzilla.initng.thinktux.net/ > Done ;-) thought this may be gentoo specific