USB drive, multiplication of mountpoints

I am running Fedora Core 4. I am having the following problem when I plug in a USB 
drive.

When I first plugged it in, a mountpoint was created, /media/usbdisk, but it was 
not automounted. I had to mount it by first executing fdisk -l as root to get the 
device assigned to the drive, /dev/sdc1, then executing mount /dev/sdc1 as an 
ordinary user, so it would be writable.

But I found that each time I plugged in the drive again, it got assigned to a new 
mountpoint, /media/usbdisk1, usbdisk2, usbdisk3, ... , and to a different device, 
/dev/sdd1, sde1, sdf1, sdg1, sdh1, ...

Now I was dissatisfied with the label attached to the drive, "usbdisk". Tried to 
label the drive, but could not do that under Linux. Plugged it in to a Windows XP 
system, where I gave it the label USB-6-00. When I plugged it back in to the Linux 
system, a mountpoint was created for it named /media/USB-6-00 . Okay so far, 
except that the mountpoints /media/usbdisk, etc., were still there, and deleting 
them and rebooting didn't get rid of them. No matter what I tried, a reboot or 
service haldaemon restart recreated them all, even without the drive plugged in.

I also found that each time I plugged in the drive, I get a new mountpoint: 
USB-6-001, USB-6-002, USB-6-003, ...

Now my firewire drive, labeled WD-120-00, always gets mounted on /media/WD-120-00 
when I reboot. Yes, if I unplug it and plug it in again, I get a new mountpoint, 
/media/WD-120-001, but it goes away when I reboot.

I can't get rid of those superfluous mountpoints. I delete them from /fstab and 
mtab and try to use fstab-sync. I've tried to explore Hal and udev, but so far I 
haven't been able to figure out how to

1. Get the same mountpoint back when I reboot, and preferably, when I plug the 
drive in again.

2. Get rid of the superfluous mountpoints.

3. Assign the same device to the same drive, identified by its label. It is okay 
to assign a new device and mountpoint if I plug in a different drive with a 
different label, but the label should control the assignment.

Can someone provide a step-by-step howto for doing all this, without skipping 
steps you might think obvious, but that may not be for a newcomer to Hal and udev. 
Is there a convenient tool for configuring this kind of situation?

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