version 0.5 of the Hardware Abstraction Layer (HAL) creates child device objects only when a file system is mounted. In cases where a storage device cannot be polled (for example, a floppy drive or IDE Zip drive), HAL adds mount methods to the device itself rather than the volume. Previously, this meant that when used in conjunction with HAL 0.5, KDE 3 would not allow users to mount file systems on devices which the HAL could not poll. KDE now includes a modified HAL back end that allows users to mount and unmount volumes through the storage devices detected by the HAL. (BZ#469723)

previously, when KDE refreshed desktop icons, it did not refresh the list of icons that it should display on the desktop. As a consequence, icons could appear on the desktop even when the file that they represented had been deleted, and refreshing the desktop would not remove these icons. This situation could arise, for example, when viewing files on an NFS share. When KDE refreshes its view of the desktop, it now updates the list of icons first and therefore avoids drawing icons for non-existent files. (BZ#472295)